OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDA

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CAN

Postby admin » Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:31 am

PART 3 OF 3

BRZEZINSKI ORCHESTRATES THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian militants seized the United States Embassy in Tehran Iran and took 60 American diplomatic personnel as hostages. This incident was cynically exploited by Brzezinski as a proto-September 11 pretext to create a strategic crisis in the Persian Gulf region. The pretext cited for the seizure of the embassy in the taking of the U.S. diplomatic hostages was the fact that the Shah of Iran had been admitted to the U.S. on October 22, 1979 in order to receive medical treatment. The Shah had been living in Mexico, and there was no reason why he could not have received top-flight medical care in that country. But Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller had demanded that the Shah be admitted to the United States. Since David Rockefeller was Brzezinski's boss on the Trilateral Commission, the orchestration of the seizure of the hostages becomes evident. Carter was dimly aware of the implications of admitting the Shah to this country and he did reportedly ask at a meeting, "when the Iranians take our people in Tehran hostage, what would you advise me then?"

At this very same time the Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he inveighed against the United States as "the great Satan." But this posturing did not prevent Yazdi from holding a closed-door meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The London Financial Times reported on October 5, 1979 that, as a result of these meetings, the Carter regime had ordered the "resumption of large-scale airlifts of arms to Iran" and was considering dispatching a "limited number of technicians" to that country. Simultaneously, the U.S. military began a buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The Carter regime was in contact with Yazdi through former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark of the left wing of the U.S. intelligence community. Clark wrote to Yazdi: "it is critically important to show that despots cannot escape and live in wealth while the nations they ravaged continued to suffer." When this letter later became public, it was "taken as evidence that special envoy Clark had incited the Iranians to take over the embassy and demand the return of the Shah to Iran."

BRZEZINSKI AND YAZDI; BRZEZINSKI AND SADDAM HUSSEIN

On November 1, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Yazdi in Algeria. "According to intelligence sources, it was during this last tete-a-tete that final details concerning the embassy takeover were hammered out." Further details of the embassy seizure and hostage-taking were discussed by Yazdi upon his return to Teheran with the U.S. charge d'affaires Bruce Laingen, who was a key operative in the political charade that was about to begin." (Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini [New York: RTR 1981]. pp. 59-60)

Because U.S. hostages had been taken, Brzezinski circles were able to argue behind the scenes that it was imperative to keep up arms shipments to the Iranians, because this appeasement of the Khomeini regime was the only way to keep the hostages alive. At no point during the entire Carter administration were arms shipments by the United States to Iran ever halted. They were seamlessly maintained, and this is the beginning of the weapons trafficking which came into public view years later in the form of the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986. Another reason why Brzezinski wanted to arm Iran was that he was already planning to play Iran off against Iraq in the genocidal Gulf War, which went far towards destroying both of these countries.

The characteristic feature of Brzezinski's method is to avoid direct U.S. military intervention as long as possible, while attempting to destroy emerging Third World powers and other possible rivals of the United States by playing them off one against the other. (The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, as a result of the gullibility of the U.S. asset Saddam Hussein. Brzezinski's emissaries convinced Saddam that it would be easy to invade Iran and grab the oil province of Khuzestan or Arabistan, where the Abadan refineries and the Karg island tanker terminal are located. In reality, Brzezinski was seeking to consolidate and perpetuate the Khomeini regime, which by that point was in the process of internal collapse. The attack by a foreign enemy gave the Khomeini regime a second wind, and led to a bloody stalemate which lasted for eight full years, until September 1988. Iranian casualties in this war approached one million dead, with those of Iraq being estimated at about 400,000 fatalities. This is the characteristic handiwork of Brzezinski.)

SEIZING IRANIAN ASSETS TO ABORT EUROPEAN MONETARY REFORM

A key feature of the crisis was Carter's seizure of more than $6 billion in Iranian assets inside the United States. The new Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, just founded by Brzezinski and Huntington, was a key part of the planning of this illegal move. The resulting turmoil in the international financial markets was useful to Brzezinski in that it blocked the development of the emerging French-German European Monetary System as a global alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both controlled by the Anglo-Americans. Only one month before the Iranian crisis erupted, French Foreign Minister Jean Francois-Poncet had told reporters at the United Nations in New York of the European "vision" that the EMS would come to replace the IMF and World Bank at the center of the world financial architecture. (Dreyfus 63)

As a result of the hostage crisis, Brzezinski was perfectly positioned to blackmail Western Europe and Japan on a series of points that were of interest to the Wall Street banking community. Brzezinski demanded that the Europeans and Japanese scrupulously observe the U.S. economic sanctions and economic blockade against Iran. The only alternative to economic sanctions and economic warfare, he argued, was a direct military attack by the U.S. on Iran. It was in this context that Brzezinski told the Frankfurter Rundschau: "It is now up to Europe to prevent World War III." (Dreyfus 66)

This was helped along by a pattern of U.S. military threats to bomb Iranian oilfields or tanker terminals as part of an alleged retaliation for the seizure of the hostages. It was clear that the main victims who would suffer from any U.S. attack on Iran were more the Europeans and Japanese than the Iranians themselves, since oil deliveries out of the Persian Gulf would be severely restricted.

Brzezinski's blackmail was clearly understood by European leaders, who had long despised him. A November 28, 1979 column published in the Figaro of Paris by Paul Marie de la Gorce is indicative in this regard. The author was widely regarded as speaking for French President Giscard d'Estaing. This column stated that any U.S. military attack on Iran would cause "more damage for Europe and Japan than for Iran." Those who propose such a strategy, the French observer noted, were quite possibly courting a new world war, and were "consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger." (Dreyfus 65) All quite correct, except for the fact that the crisis was being orchestrated by Brzezinski, an even greater madman and lunatic adventurer than Kissinger.

THE CARTER DOCTRINE OF JANUARY 1980: SOURCE OF THE IRAQ WAR

Brzezinski used the hostage crisis to promulgate the so-called Carter Doctrine on the Persian Gulf, which was included in the January 1980 State of the Union address. Brzezinski insisted against all objections on the inclusion of this critical passage: "Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Columnist Joseph Kraft called this lunacy "a breathtaking progression from the dream world to the world of reality." (Rozell 161) This was a piece of incalculable folly, since it threw down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union in the most provocative possible way. This Carter doctrine has also provided the basis for every U.S. fiasco in the Persian Gulf region over the last several decades, including the first Gulf War to eject Iraq from Kuwait and the current Iraq war itself. If you don't like the Iraq war, you need to reserve a significant part of the blame for Brzezinski, who is so to speak the founder of the policy carried out by Bush the Elder and Bush the younger. The fact that Brzezinski today tries to acquire left cover by posing as a principled enemy of the Iraq war simply underlines his hypocrisy and guile, and the gullibility of the left liberals who believe him.

BRZEZINSKI'S DESERT ONE DEBACLE

By the spring of 1980, it was clear to the world that the Carter regime was preparing a desperate military launch into Iran under the pretext of freeing the hostages. In an article that hit the streets on April 22, 1980, the Executive Intelligence Review reported that the Carter regime "has begun a headlong drive towards a Cuban missile crisis-style nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over Iran, timed to occur between late April and May 11, for the purpose of blackmailing Western Europe and Japan into submitting to Anglo-American political dictates." (Dreyfus 65) The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda editorialized on April 11, 1980: "Washington is not only aiming at aggravating its conflict with Teheran. Judging from everything, it is venturing a risky bluff: blackmailing Iran, as well as America's allies who depend on oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf with the threat of direct military intervention." The Soviet commentary saw that "this strategy puts Western Europe and Japan in the position of being forced participants in a game designed to strengthen the shaken position of U.S. imperialism in the near and Middle East." This Moscow observer concluded that "the prospect of being deprived of Iranian oil does not provoke any enthusiasm, especially not in Tokyo, Bonn, or Paris." (Dreyfus 66)

VANCE FEARED WORLD WAR III WITH MOSCOW

The tragic failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, a rendezvous point inside Iran, was on the surface yet another proof of the incompetence and chaos of the Carter administration. There was some question as to whether the rescue mission had been sabotaged by CIA forces loyal to the Bush political machine to abort a pre-October surprise by Carter, since George H. W. Bush was now on his way to becoming Reagan's vice presidential running mate. This may have been what Iraqi state radio was driving at when it alleged that the failed U.S. attack was "playacting carried out in orchestration between Washington and Tehran." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest at the rescue mission, although this fact was not made public until after the mission had failed. "We haven't begun just an attack on Iran," Vance reportedly commented, "We may have started World War III." Rumors swirled around Washington to the effect that the failure of the hostage mission had been caused by a direct Soviet military intervention including MIG-21 aircraft, and according to some unconfirmed accounts the Soviet bombardment of the Desert One site. But this may have been an obvious enough cover story to hide the actions of the Bush crowd, or of deliberate sabotage by Brzezinski networks. (Dreyfus 67-68) With the failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, some key Wall Street backers of the Carter administration such as George Ball and Averell Harriman bolted for the exits, abandoning the peanut farmer to his fate. Brzezinski, by contrast, constituted a stay-behind operation to run the Carter administration to its bitter end, which he personally had done so much to hasten.

At about the same time that the Soviet Union was moving into Afghanistan, fundamentalist fanatics attacked the grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine of Islam, holding hundreds of pilgrims as hostages. In Pakistan, a mob of 20,000 Muslim rioters attacked and destroyed the American embassy in Islamabad, killing two Americans. The rioters had been told that the U.S. had orchestrated the attack on the grand Mosque in Mecca. Another serious incident was an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, which resulted in the murder of the U.S. ambassador. Given Brzezinski's commitment to crisis and confrontation, it is not difficult to establish him as a prime suspect in the orchestration of all these attacks.

PD-59: BRZEZINSKI STRIVES FOR TACTICAL NUCLEAR WAR, COUNTERFORCE STRIKES

In the wake of the failed hostage rescue mission, Brzezinski promulgated a new piece of strategic insanity and brinksmanship in the form of Presidential Directive 59, issued in August 1980. This document called for the United States to adopt a policy of limited or tactical nuclear war wherever needed to be able to deal with Soviet strategic moves. It was the brainchild of Brzezinski and Carter's Defense Secretary, Harold "Bomber" Brown, one of the Strangeloves who had helped carry out strategic bombing during the Vietnam War.

PD-59 represented a giant step away from the doctrine of deterrence, otherwise known as mutually assured destruction (MAD), which had been the only means of keeping the peace of the world after the late 1950s. PD-59 talked about the possibility of counterforce attacks against Soviet nuclear assets in addition to the long-standing targeting of population centers as part of a so-called counter-value strategy. Brzezinski and Brown claimed that this harebrained scheme meant that the United States nuclear deterrent would continue to be credible even in the face of a Soviet military buildup. But sane observers pointed out that the PD-59 policy vastly increased the chances of crossing the nuclear threshold into the unthinkable realm of nuclear exchange, because it made atomic hostilities easier to start. The Soviet news agency TASS described this new strategy as "madness," while Pravda attacked it as "nuclear blackmail" destined to cause a new acceleration of the arms race.

BRZEZINSKI'S EUROMISSILES CRISIS, 1979-1983

In 1979, NATO had decided under prodding by Brzezinski to begin the process leading to the stationing of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe as a counter to the deployment of Soviet SS 20 intermediate range ballistic missiles. Carter had held a very public discussion with himself about building the neutron bomb, which further inflamed the suspicions of Moscow. He then decided to build and deploy the MX multi-warhead ICBM. All of these moves were dictated by the insane warmonger Brzezinski, and they helped to move the world towards the brink of general thermonuclear war, as the French and German governments noted with alarm. Combined with events in Afghanistan and in Iran, the new U.S. doctrine of counterforce combined with tactical nuclear warfare had created a superpower crisis of the first magnitude, all within about 36 months of the Carter Brzezinski regime coming into power.

To further antagonize the Soviets, Carter slapped a total grain embargo on the Soviet Union, and boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Relations between Washington and Moscow reached an absolute nadir. Although he is approaching 80 years of age, it is a safe bet that the aging Strangelove Brzezinski will still be capable of taking today's world to the brink in even less time under a future Obama administration.

THREE MILE ISLAND ON CARTER'S WATCH

Perhaps the event which best symbolized and summed up the abyss of cultural pessimism and historical despair into which the Carter administration had led the United States was a nuclear incident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in late March, 1979. A malfunction at a nuclear reactor was used by the controlled corporate media to unleash a wave of panic and hysteria which gripped the United States for several days. Not one person was killed in the entire incident. Nevertheless, the Three Mile Island affair was used to solidify and consolidate the post-1968 cultural paradigm shift away from traditional notions of science and progress in that direction of historical pessimism and the limits of growth which had been proclaimed by the neofascist Club of Rome just a decade earlier. Carter had come into office with the firm intent to sabotage the nuclear modernization of the developing countries, and this Three Mile Island incident allowed him to shut down the nuclear reactor industry inside the United States. Since the Three Mile Island media circus, not one new nuclear reactor has been completed and placed online in this country. The incident inside the reactor was extremely suspicious: the entire fiasco came just two weeks after the premiere of a film entitled The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. This was an obvious scenario film which showed a devastating incident at a nuclear reactor.

It is a good rule of thumb to assume that when a scenario film appears on television or in the movies, and the actual event then occurs soon afterward, an intelligence network has used the scenario film to prepare public opinion for the real-world event. Just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001, for example, Fox television broadcast the scenario film The Lone Gunmen, which showed a hijacked airliner almost colliding with the World Trade Center towers in New York City. With a few variations, the plot was broadly similar to what then happened on September 11. It was known at the time of Three Mile Island that the most likely cause of this incident had not been a mechanical failure of the reactor itself, but rather deliberate sabotage by one of the employees at the plant, obviously enough in the framework of a covert operation designed to paralyze or destroy the nuclear power industry in the United States.

The Carter administration failed miserably in determining what had actually happened at Three Mile Island, and eagerly embraced the thesis that nuclear energy was inherently unsafe. Together with the Volcker interest-rate policies at the Federal Reserve, Three Mile Island was a principal factor in the de-industrialization of the United States carried out during the Carter years. Here again, this country has not recovered to this day from the destruction wrought under the Carter regime. Those who are concerned about greenhouse gases today should recall that it was under Carter that the fateful decision against nuclear energy and in favor of coal-fired plants was made.

Speaking on the National Public Radio Diane Rehm program on February 27, 2008, correspondent Joe Hebert of the Associated Press speculated that another incident on the scale of Three Mile Island would essentially doom the nuclear power industry in the United States, putting an end to the current trend for nuclear power to make a comeback in this country. This raises the obvious question: is a new nuclear reactor incident being planned for a future Obama administration? We can be reasonably sure that if such an incident were to occur, Obama would be just as hostile to finding out what had really happened as Bush was in regard to September 11.

GLOBAL 2000: GENOCIDE AS OFFICIAL U.S. POLICY

It was during the Jimmy Carter regime that policies of population reduction in the Third World, amounting to thinly veiled genocide, were instituted as the imperative doctrine of the United States government. Many of the documents in question, such as Global 2000 and Global Futures, were produced in the State Department under Carter's second secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, who replaced Vance in 1979.

By the spring of 1980, the resident Strangelove of the White House, who had now outlasted his rival Cyrus Vance, had also become a huge public relations liability, both in terms of his track record and in terms of his personality. Newsweek magazine wrote that: ''as things now stand, the president's uncertain diplomatic strategy has left allies perplexed, enemies unimpressed, and the nation as vulnerable as ever in an increasingly dangerous world." One prominent historian of the Carter presidency writes that: "because of his high profile and combative Cold War views, Brzezinski came under particular attack, prompting Jody Powell to urge Carter to curb the NSC adviser's public appearances. 'To put it bluntly,' Powell stated, 'Zbig needs to almost drop from public view for the next few months at least.'" (Kaufman 176)

This analysis was correct: when Brzezinski appeared at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City, he was heavily booed, especially by Kennedy delegates. Brzezinski was widely recognized at that time as the most unpopular member of the Carter administration -- no mean feat, given how much Carter and some of his underlings were hated. It may well be that Brzezinski was the most unpopular figure in any Democratic administration since Johnson left office in January 1969 until of course Zbig rehabilitated himself by becoming a critic of the Iraq war. Today, Obama is wisely keeping Brzezinski in the closet and denying his relationship with the Polish incendiary.

BILLY CARTER AND BILLYGATE

Yet another factor dragging down the Carter regime was the dubious role of the president's younger brother, Billy Carter. Billy had attracted notoriety by attempting to market a brand of beer bearing his own name, the so-called Billy Beer. He had also undertaken a highly publicized trip to Libya in 1978 to meet with officials of the regime of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. Soon the Justice Department had to ask Billy to register as a foreign agent for the Libyan government. One of Billy's missions was to procure an increase in Libyan oil deliveries to the Charter Oil Company. By July 1980, it became known that Billy Carter had received $220,000 from the Libyan government. Zbigniew Brzezinski had had a role in the scandal, and may have been one of the leakers who had started the ball rolling. A White House statement specified that Zbigniew Brzezinski had met with Billy Carter and a Libyan official in November 1979 to talk about the possibility of getting Libyan help to release the U.S. hostages held in Iran. This idea had been endorsed by First Lady Rosalind Carter. When Billy had traveled to Libya for his second trip in early 1980, he had taken with him some confidential cables from the State Department. This dose of new corruption evidence was yet another blow to Carter's popularity. "That damn Billy Carter stuff is killing us," commented Hamilton Jordan of the Carter White House. (Kaufman 191)

THE CARTER REGIME: AUSTERITY, PAIN AND SACRIFICE

Perhaps another of the reasons that Carter and Brzezinski did not in fact pitch the world into all-out thermonuclear war during 1980 had to do with the precipitous collapse of the Carter regime on the home front. In November 1980, Eizenstat warned Carter that in the public perception, his economic policy was "viewed solely as austerity, pain, and sacrifice." (Kaufman 179) Carter had been programmed as an austerity president, and he was now the target of widespread popular rage and resentment for precisely that reason. He had betrayed his own political base. In early 1980, Carter secured the creation of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation with authority to spend $88 billion over the next decade to develop alternative energy sources. This is yet another precursor to the current alternative proposals pushed by Bush and Obama. Carter during early 1980 was also demanding a 10 cents per gallon surcharge on all imported oil. He also demanded the creation of an Energy Mobilization Board, to override state laws and regulations on matters pertaining to energy supplies. He was doing this a few months before a general election, and despite his own wretched popularity ratings in the public opinion polls.

On June 4, 1980, both houses of Congress repudiated Carter by approving a joint resolution killing the proposed oil import tax. The vote was 73 to 16 in the Senate and 376 to 30 in the House, in spite of the three-to-two Democratic majority in the Senate, and a two-to-one edge in the House. It was the first time that a two-thirds majority of the Congress had overwritten the veto of a president from the same party since Harry Truman in the early 1950s, and showed that Carter had so alienated and antagonized the Democrats on Capitol Hill that he had no working majority. Carter whined that his defeat represented a new low in congressional performance during his time in office. Fortunately for the world, Carter settled into the status of a lame duck and concentrated on his doomed reelection effort against the Republican Reagan-Bush ticket.

NOVEMBER 1980: CARTER CARRIES FIVE STATES AND D.C.

In the November 1980 elections, Carter was able to carry the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, and Maryland for a total of 49 electoral votes to the 489 rolled up by Reagan Bush. This landslide marked the beginning of a reactionary nightmare in American politics which continued unmitigated until the arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992, and has continued to exercise a profoundly negative influence on the United States until this very day.

DID BRZEZINSKI RECRUIT OBAMA IN 1981-83?

As for Carter, he became a virtual pariah after leaving office, taking no part whatsoever in the 1984 Democratic national convention or in the campaign of his former Vice President Walter Mondale. He seemed to retreat into the argument that the United States had become ungovernable during his time in office, and that there was nothing that he could have done differently. As for Brzezinski, he went back to Columbia University and by all indications busied himself with the recruitment of a stable of new Manchurian candidates on the Carter model to be deployed farther down the line, in a total political and economic crisis which Samuel Huntington was then predicting for the years between 2010 and 2030. Among the bright young men on the make that Brzezinski began to draw into his orbit at this time was, in all probability, the youthful Barack Obama, who had transferred to Columbia University in 1981, and who graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science, a specialization in international relations, and a thesis topic involving Soviet nuclear disarmament -- a topic that represented Brzezinski's personal area of interest as the boss of the Columbia Institute for Communist Affairs.

CARTER AS HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PESSIMIST

In an essay entitled "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," the new deal scholar William E. Leuchtenburg cites an important line from Carter's inaugural address of January 1977: "we have learned that 'more' is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits." Leuchtenburg then goes on to quote the following comment by Carter in his later memoirs: "Watching the sea of approving faces [on Inauguration Day], I wondered how few of the happy celebrants would agree with my words if they analyzed them closely. At the time, it was not possible even for me to imagine the limits we would have to face. In some ways, dealing with limits would become the subliminal theme of the next four years and affect the outcome of the 1980 election." Carter evidently knew well enough right at the outset that he had hoodwinked the American people. Leuchtenburg quotes a remark by Michael Malbin that "Americans remain a people of the Enlightenment who find it hard to accept the postmodern (or ancient) view of a world of limited possibilities." In other words, a presidency founded on historical and cultural pessimism, most notably in the form of Malthusian austerity, is unlikely to be accepted by Americans, and leads to failure and ungovernability. Despite indications of ideological decadence and moral senility in the American people around the turn of the 21st century, it is very likely that the tendency to reject historical and cultural pessimism remains surprisingly strong, and could emerge powerfully under conditions of crisis. A resurgence of scientific optimism and activist government is precisely what synthetic candidates like Carter and Obama have been designed to sabotage. Leuchtenburg cites a reporter who summed up the conclusion of the Carter presidency by remarking: "He preached to us constantly about sacrifice and limitations, which none of us wanted to hear."

The tremendous demoralization and despair associated with the Carter presidency opened the door for the right-wing reactionary Ronald Reagan, who went to the White House wearing a mask of sunny optimism. Leuchtenburg quotes the comment of one scholar that "whatever Reagan did, many Americans felt, would be better than the handwringing, sermons, and demands for sacrifice of the last four years." One former Carter official summed up his boss's message in the following terms: "in order to be a good American ... You've got to drive cars you don't like ... And turn up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter. You're a pig, you've been using too much energy all your life and you've got to change." (Leuchtenburg 22-23)

CARTER AND THE DEMOCRATS' RETREAT FROM THE NEW DEAL

The Carter presidency inaugurated a retreat from the heritage of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal which has been disastrous for the Democratic Party. It was under Carter that the great U-turn in American life, from rising standards of living to falling standards of living, became evident and institutionalized. From the Carter era onwards, American living standards have been in a process of precipitous decline, down to the current level of barely a third of the Eisenhower-Kennedy norm. When Walter Mondale ran for president in 1984, he began including trade unions and teachers' unions among the sinister interest groups whose influence in Washington had to be contained, as if they were big oil or big pharmaceuticals -- he was carrying on the same process. When Michael Dukakis in 1988 said that the main issue in the election was competence and not ideology, this was another coded repudiation of the Roosevelt tradition. Dukakis ostentatiously refused to offer any promise of increased federal spending to fight poverty.

Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over, embraced free trade sellouts, and abolished the welfare system, abandoning millions of poor children to a grim fate. These wretched policies could never take the place of FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, and LBJ's Great Society.

A FITTING MONUMENT TO CARTER: A BOTTOMLESS PIT

After the Carter administration had left Washington, the prominent trade unionist William R. Winpisinger of the International Association of Machinists was asked for his evaluation of Carter's place in history. He replied: ''as presidents go, he was on a par with Calvin Coolidge. I consider his abilities mediocre, his actions pusillanimous, and his administration a calamity for America's working people. Since an obelisk soaring 555 feet into the air symbolizes the nation's admiration and respect for George Washington, it would seem the only fitting memorial for Jimmy Carter would be a bottomless pit." (Leuchtenburg 17)

MALTHUSIANISM SPELLS DOOM FOR DEMOCRATS

Jimmy Carter is of course not the only failed president of the last several decades, but he is the only Democrat other than Clinton to reach the White House since the end of the Johnson administration in 1969. Carter's administration is today little understood by younger voters, and older voters are not anxious to remember the agony of the Carter years. The Democratic Party has had its share of failed and dysfunctional presidential candidates -- George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry come to mind. All of these figures shared the same essential crippling flaw: they could not understand that an embrace of the ideology of the limits of growth and the inevitability of scarcity had to doom any concerns about the alleviation of poverty, the defense of the middle class, or the provision of adequate education, health care, housing, transportation, and other social services -- to say nothing of improving the lot of the impoverished masses of the developing countries.

Before 1968, Malthusianism was considered an alien doctrine among American leftists. It was after all the New Deal and not any free-market orgy that for the first time in human history unlocked the secrets of the atom, put human beings on the moon, and opened the era of computer technology. It is only as a result of the disorientation, disillusionment, defeat, and despair of the late 1960s and early 1970s that ideas about the limits of growth and the impossibility of making people's lives better through science, technology, and progress became pervasive. During his first year in office, French President Nicholas Sarkozy told the French that they are now living in an "age of scarcity." Yet, there is no objective reason why this should be so. The age of scarcity ideology represents a self-imposed block, a universe in which no progressive causes can survive. Jimmy Carter's greatest failing was his intellectual incapacity to reject the ideology of scarcity and austerity. Today, under circumstances which have qualitatively deteriorated since Carter's time, the Obama candidacy proposes a final capitulation to these reactionary and inhumane ideas.

OBAMA: A NEW DISASTER A LA CARTER

It is hoped that this retrospective summary of the Carter-Brzezinski-Volcker Trilateral administration of 1977 to 1981 will help the public to identify the Obama candidacy as a warmed-over version, more sophisticated and elaborate to be sure, of the same sinister methods which made the Carter regime such a nightmare. Far from being fresh and new, Obama represents a thoroughly discredited model which has already been tried and which has failed. In spite of his own reckless folly, Carter was nevertheless able to complete four years in office. There is, however, no guarantee that the United States of America could survive an Obama-Brzezinski presidency for that long.

THE BRZEZINSKI PLAYBOOK -- HINTS OF THE FUTURE UNDER OBAMA

This brief retrospective of the 1977-1981 Brzezinski-Carter administration can perhaps provide us with a repertoire of tricks and tactics in which Brzezinski can be considered well-versed, and which we may therefore expect may well be carried out during a possible Obama administration. We can call this brief catalogue the Brzezinski Playbook.

1. Economic stagflation was a new term that had to be invented to describe the Carter-Brzezinski Volcker Trilateral combination of unprecedented unemployment and high inflation. Now the newspapers are full of dire predictions of stagflation. This time, Brzezinski's policies will consummate the existing tendencies toward hyperinflationary depression, something like the Carter economic crisis raised to the third or fourth power.

2. Brzezinski is a past master of orchestrating and exploiting for political purposes attacks on embassies and the seizure of diplomatic personnel as hostages. On his watch, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan was murdered, and the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan attacked by a large mob. The most celebrated example of Zbig's handiwork in this department was of course the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the taking of the 52 U.S. personnel there as hostages from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. This was a complex operation arranged via many channels, but the finishing touches were applied when Brzezinski met with Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi in Algeria on November 1, 1979. Shortly after the Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence in February 2008, a strange attack on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia occurred which could not be assigned to any known Serbian group. This had all the earmarks of a Brzezinski operation.

3. Brzezinski is also an expert in the use of color revolutions and people power coups. The most notable example on Brzezinski's watch remains the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the installation of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Brzezinski wanted to use as a means of popularizing Islamic fundamentalism, which he wanted to use as a weapon for the subversion of the USSR. The March 2008 Tibet insurrection is a typical Brzezinski gambit, aiming at the destabilization and weakening of China as a whole. The fact that the vehicle is that feudal monster and parasite, the very spiritual NATO agent and provocateur who calls himself the "Dalai Lama," only increases the gusto for Brzezinski, who is a low-level Polish nobleman. Look for color revolutions in Syria, Venezuela, and other countries. Pakistan is experiencing the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's failed color revolution, and is being pushed into breakup by the U.S.-U.K.

4. Playing one country against another in an attempt to destroy both is one of Brzezinski's favorite ploys. He boasts that he played the USSR against Afghanistan and destroyed the Soviet regime in the process. He also played Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran, to weaken both countries and also to consolidate the Khomeini fundamentalist dictatorship in Iran, which probably would have fallen without the extra cohesion afforded by a foreign aggressor. The playing of Ethiopia against Somalia in late 2006-early 2007 and of Colombia against Venezuela in the spring of 2008 are typical examples of Brzezinski's handiwork. Look for him to attempt to play Syria and Iran against Russia. His larger goals include playing Europe and China against Russia in the huge pincers operation. This ploy is likely to blow up in his face -- the last world war grew out of the British attempt to play Hitler against Stalin, an equally crackpot scheme.

5. Olympic boycotts for political purposes are a Brzezinski specialty; he led the effort by the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski's own subversion operations there. In 2008, look for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics to make the Chinese leaders lose face. Consider Mexico City 1968 and Munich 1972 for possible variations. The U.S. will face the later harvest of hate, but Brzezinski hardly cares about that.

6. As a fanatical feudalist, Brzezinski hates science and progress. The deliberate sabotage of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was played out on Brzezinski's watch in 1979. The incident had been immediately preceded by the release of the film The China Syndrome, which provided an accurate scenario for the staged incident that was about to happen. With Obama heavily in debt to the coal mine owners, a new sabotage of a nuclear reactor, this time perhaps with real victims, might well be on the agenda, in a bid to end the U.S. nuclear industry forever, condemning this country to fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world, which is going for nuclear energy on an unprecedented scale.

7. To increase environmentalist-Malthusian hysteria and increase public willingness to accept carbon taxes and the burdens of a "cap and trade" speculative market, Brzezinski might well opt for a new fake energy shortage like that of the summer of 1979, complete with endless gas lines stretching over the horizon.

8. Brzezinski's tenure at the NSC also coincided with the great European terrorist offensive of 1977-78 against the European Monetary System and the Schmidt-Giscard-Moro push towards European self-assertion. In Germany in 1977, the Baader-Meinhof group, a tool of NATO intelligence, murdered state prosecutor Buback, the business leader Schleyer, and the banker Ponto, while CIA-controlled Palestinian crazies hijacked a German plane to Mogadiscio, Somalia. In 1977, gun-toting extremists engaged in firefights with police in the center of Rome, and in March 1978 the CIA's own Red Brigades kidnapped and later murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Watch therefore for a new wave of terrorism against those who oppose Brzezinski's plans.

This brief account is indebted to the following works:

William E. Leuchtenburg, "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," in Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998)

Charles O. Jones, The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)

Mark J. Rozelle, The Press and the Carter Presidency (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1989)

Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993)

Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Executive Intelligence Review, 1981)

Jules Witcover, Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 (New York: Signet, 1977)
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Re: OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CAN

Postby admin » Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:36 am

PART 1 OF 2

The new Gladio in action? "Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria."

By Jonathan Mowat

"Gene Sharp started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power.' And I thought, 'Boy is this guy speaking my language,' that is what armed struggle is about."

-- Col. Robert Helvey


WASHINGTON, March 19, 2005. The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as president of Ukraine has completed the field-testing of the "Postmodern Coup." Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and tried unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country." One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers. And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to "fool and brainwash" the young intelligentsia in his own country, he banned the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004, article entitled "U.S. campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory -- whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the U.S. government, deploying U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as U.S. ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the U.S. ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hard man, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation -- engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience -- is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.


Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslavakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one of its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogs) and cell phones (including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible "Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like -- a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s. "With the crushing ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3, 2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian leaders to civic groups." She might have mentioned the video games that helped create the deranged mindset of these "civic groups." The repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through their aptly named blog, "Le Sabot Post-Moderne," is indicative of the technical and sociological components involved.

A CIVILIAN REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly deploy small groups suggests that we are seeing the civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real-time" intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

This parallel should not be surprising, since the U.S. military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places (for example the RAND Corporation) for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the U.S. military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent) and nonlethal (nonviolent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a fundamental element in both violent and nonviolent forms of warfare. This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the theoreticians of the postmodern coup, for example, Dr. Peter Ackerman, the author of Strategic Nonviolent Conflict (Praeger 1994). Writing in the National Catholic Reporter on April 26, 2002, Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power: The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq -- thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top U.S. weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, D.C., of which former U.S. Air Force officer Jack DuVall is president. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington, D.C. It was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Petersen in 1989 "to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

"SWARMING ADOLESCENTS" AND "REBELLIOUS HYSTERIA"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case (as Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations," in the group's "Human Relations") because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles de Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations" in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture" at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations," and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media."

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups -- the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate) impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, and put targeted states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and later Chairman of NDI), in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country ... This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if covert, intervention by international institutions and governments threatening the targeted regime, and using well-placed operatives within the target regime's military and intelligence services to ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these traditional elements, of course, no postmodern coup could ever work. Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnival and Conspiracy in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

GLADIO AND JAMES BOND GET A YOUTH GROUP

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshoot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A. J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former U.S. Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001, interview with film producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators -- especially in Myanmar, where he had been stationed as military attache -- and seeing the potential of Sharp's alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the U.S. Defence Attache in Yangdon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group.... He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989, and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr. Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a foreword by George Kennan, the famous "Mr. X," the 1940's architect of the Cold War and founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society ungovernable by would-be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples of Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovak resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9.

In his foreword, Kennan praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional, purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO country languages. See the Italian translation of the book (Verso un 'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were, ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and nonmilitary means. The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light (immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the U.S. Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the name civilian-based defense to Sharp," according to John M. Mecartney, Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute, in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985, Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the U.S. Army, was giving seminars at Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War."

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory board in those years. Following his posting as the head of U.S. Army intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that Gen. Atkeson, who also advised CSIS on "international security," served as "national intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports, "was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor in Serbia, Kmara in Georgia, Pora in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.

AND DOPE TOO?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrgyzstan, now at the top of the hit list, is another opium conduit. And George Soros, "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s, when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia, when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created with U.S. and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the U.S. ambassador whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

THE SERBIAN VIRUS

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11, 2000, by Michael Dobbs, entitled "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's catchphrase.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.


Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert, analyzed and popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary series and book, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, together with retired U.S. Airforce officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.


Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone who ... had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in Tiananmen, where the army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work -- and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's book, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation." Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action" freely adapting sections of it into a Serbian language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual." Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the Budapest Hilton in March 2000.


Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to authority, and also how to subvert the regime's "pillars of support," including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement and alienate the international community, from which material and financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it: "Stay nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like T-shirts and stickers.

NO LACK OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMPLOYMENT

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe, notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April 2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the U.S. overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website, reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following developments in Belarus since early this year, it is clear that Zubr was developed or at least conceptualized using Otpor as a model. Also, [AEI report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is available in English on the Zubr website at http://www.zubr-belarus.com. Of course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However, the successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases, which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other countries.


And with funding provided by Freedom House and the U.S. government, Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance in Budapest to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth movement, Ian Traynor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004 article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Nonviolent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.


Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the U.S.-educated Mr Saakashvili traveled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the U.S. embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs traveling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary-Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the U.S. State Department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.


An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004, entitled "Serbia's Export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:

"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor, the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging daily protests -- carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies -- with "training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus. In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training," group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was flying high on white flags again -- this time in Georgia, when protesters stormed the parliament in an action that led to the toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was following the strategies of Otpor.


James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's deportation, in an October 14, 2004, press release which reported that he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's "unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline:

• Otpor founded in Belgrade, Serbia in October 1998. Postmodern Coup overthrows Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000. Subsequently forms Center for Nonviolent Resistance to spread revolutions.
• Clinton Administration's Community of Democracies launched in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000.
• Zubr founded in Minsk, Belarus, on January 14, 2001. Election-Coup efforts fail in September 9, 2001.
• Mjaft founded in Tirana, Albania, on March 15, 2003.
• Kmara founded in Tblisi, Georgia in April 2003. "Rose revolution" overthrows President Eduard Shevardnadze on November 23, 2003.
• Pora founded in Kiev, Ukraine in June 2004. "Orange revolution" installs Victor Yushchenko into power on December 26, 2004.
• Kmara overthrows Abashidze of Ajaria (western Georgian secessionist province) May 5, 2004.
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Re: OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CAN

Postby admin » Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:37 am

PART 2 OF 2

WHO IS COL. BOB HELVEY?

Who is Col. Bob Helvey, who personally, and through his Albert Einstein Institution, played such a key role in the Serbian and Ukrainian coups?

According to his own account, Helvey first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failures of military approaches to toppling dictators, especially in Myanmar (also known as Burma). In a January 29, 2001, interview with Steve York in Belgrade, Helvey stated:

My career has been that of a professional soldier. And one of my last assignments was to be the defense attache in Rangoon [Myanmar]. And I really had an opportunity -- two years living in Rangoon and getting around the country -- to really see first hand what happens when a people are oppressed to the point that they're absolutely terrorized.

And, you know, there was no future for people and there was a struggle for democracy going on, but it was an armed struggle on the periphery of the country and in the border regions. And it was very clear that that armed struggle was never going to succeed.

So, when I got back [to the U.S.], I kept Burma in the back of my mind. Here were a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And that was really a nonstarter, so there was really a sense of helplessness.


Back in the U.S., he reports, he was selected as senior fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs while still an active duty officer, where he attended a meeting on a "Program for Nonviolent Sanctions."

Dr. Gene Sharp happened to be there. And he started out the seminar by saying, "Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power. How to seize political power and how to deny it to others." And I thought, "Boy, this guy's talking my language." And, you know, that's what armed struggle is about. So I got interested in this approach because I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for the Burmese.

And how did he get involved in Serbia?

I had done some work along the Thai-Burmese border with the International Republican Institute. So when they were looking for someone to present information on strategic nonviolent struggle to a Serb group, they called me.


The Albert Einstein Institution repeatedly emphasizes Col. Helvey's role in training the Myanmar opposition, and a substantial amount of the group's web page stresses the group's involvement there. Reflecting this preoccupation, AEI publications have repeatedly been translated not only into Burmese, but also into Karen, Chin, Mon, Jingphaw and several other ethnic minority languages and dialects in that country.

The Albert Einstein Institution does not emphasize, however, that even the U.S. State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency identify the ethnic minority opposition to the Myanmar government as comprising the world's largest producers of opium and heroin.

The DEA's 2002 "Drug Intelligence Brief: Burma: Country Brief," for example, states:

Armed ethnic minority groups who have been in conflict with the GOB [Government of Burma, aka Myanmar ed] for decades control cultivation, production, and trafficking in Burma ... The drug trafficking groups operating within Burma are mostly insurgent factions that have been warring with the GOB and among themselves for many years.


Special note should be made here of Bo Mya and his Karen group, which Col. Helvey has advised for years. Bo Mya, now retired, has admitted to have held meetings with Burmese drug kingpin Khun Sa, which Khun Sa said were held in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate the opium and heroin routes of Myanmar and Thailand. (Bo Mya has denied Myanmar government allegations of his involvement in the narcotics trade.)

According to Khun Sa's statements -- later made famous by the U.S. military "Missing in Action" investigator "Bo" Gritz -- his opium trafficking was done under the coordination of Richard Armitage, currently U.S. Undersecretary of State.

While Col. Helvey's precise relations with the late former CIA deputy director Theodore Shackley, who had been widely accused of overseeing this narcotics trafficking, remain unknown, such reports do lend credence to claims that narcotics syndicates have played a pivotal role in the recent coups in the Balkans, and now Ukraine, which comprise an important route for Southeast Asian heroin entering Western Europe.

MYANMAR OPERATIONS

In its "Report on Activities, 1993-1999," the Albert Einstein Institution laid great stress on the importance of Helvey's operations to subvert the Myanmar regime as a centerpiece of their activities. In fact, the first paragraph of the introduction of the report reads:

Colonel Kyaw Thein was clearly unhappy with our workshop on nonviolent struggle held along the Thai-Burma border. At a September 1996 press briefing in Rangoon, the spokesman for the military dictatorship charged that "aliens and mercenaries" were trying to "disrupt the peace and tranquility" in Burma as if widespread torture, forced labor, and other human rights atrocities constitute "tranquility." The military official was incensed by an ever increasing global phenomenon: direct transnational assistance and cooperation between non-governmental organizations and pro-democracy groups around the world, in this case of course, in Burma. The Albert Einstein Institution's groundbreaking outreach on strategic nonviolent struggle is but one example of this growing trend that moves beyond traditional humanitarian and human rights efforts ...

The impetus for our intensive workshops on nonviolent struggle for Burmese groups came in November 1991, when Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. military attache in Burma, requested that we assist in reviewing lesson plans for an introductory course in nonviolent struggle. Mr. Helvey designed the course for Burmese opposition groups in part by relying on Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The May 1992 course, conducted inside Burma at the opposition headquarters at Manerplaw, was extremely well received. In fact, when leading Burmese opposition groups formed the umbrella organization National Council of the Union of Burma in August 1992, they also established a "Political Defiance Committee" to educate activists and to organize strategic nonviolent struggle inside Burma ("political defiance" is the term adopted in Burma to connote nonviolent struggle). Senior pro-democracy leaders requested additional workshops from Robert Helvey and the Albert Einstein Institution.


A Fall 1992 article in "Nonviolent Sanctions" by Gene Sharp, entitled "Exploring Nonviolent Struggle in Thailand and Burma," and found on Albert Einstein's website, describes their role in Myanmar, and in particular Col. Helvey's role:

Gene Sharp traveled to Thailand and Burma in the fall, October 20-November 8, 1992, in response to two invitations. The American Friends of Democracy in Burma (headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia) asked him to help evaluate a course on "Political Defiance" that had been taught in Manerplaw by Robert Helvey for the Democratic Alliance of Burma.

"After two days rest and orientation in Bangkok, I traveled to Mannerplaw, a base camp for the Burmese democratic opposition located along the Thai-Burma border.... During my four days in Manerplaw I participated in a variety of meetings and discussions about nonviolent struggle (or political defiance as it is more often called there). These included meetings with top political officials, military officers, and leaders of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, the National League for Democracy, the Karen Youth Organization Leadership Seminar, the Democratic Alliance of Burma, and the Political Defiance Committee."

Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and an expert on Burma, began offering a course on political defiance to groups in Manerplaw last spring. The aim of this intensive course is to give participants a basic understanding of the technique of nonviolent struggle. At the end of the course, students are expected to understand the insights into political power on which political defiance is based, and also to have developed an understanding of the technique's multiple methods, its dynamics of conflict against a repressive regime, the mechanisms of change, and the principles of strategy in nonviolent struggle.


Peace Magazine, in its April June 2003 issue, contains further details on Helvey's career, in a laudatory article entitled "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance."

From 1983 until 1985 Helvey was a U.S. military attache at the American Embassy in Rangoon, where he was dismayed by the futility of armed resistance to the brutal dictatorship of Burma. An armed struggle had continued without success for over two decades.

After retiring from the army in 1991, Helvey gave a speech in Washington, using Sharp's insights and adding his own. A member of the audience later offered to pay his way to Burma to spread his message. With this funding, from 1992 to 1998, he made 15 trips to the Thai-Burmese border to meet with more than 500 members of the National Council Union of Burma, a pro-democracy umbrella group. On eight occasions, Helvey taught a six-week course, seeking to build confidence, identify the dictatorship's major weaknesses, and form pressure groups.


Many of those attending Helvey's course had been officers in armed resistance groups for many years and were skeptical about nonviolence. For example, Auun Nang Oo, who is now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Nonviolence, was astonished that a career soldier could hold such views. Another unbeliever was General Bo Mya, the leader of the Karens, the biggest national minority. At first he would just grumble and grunt that he "wasn't interested in doing the work of cowards." To change such attitudes, Helvey coined the more militant-sounding phrase, "political defiance," which won Bo over and caused him to ask Helvey to train more Karen leaders.

The Myanmar government has also commented on Col. Helvey's career. For example, at a June 27, 1997 press conference entitled "How some Western powers have been aiding and abetting terrorism committed by certain organizations operating under the guise of democracy and human rights by giving them assistance in both cash and kind," Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt, at the time Secretary of the State Law and Order Restoration Council of Myanmar, said of Helvey:

He was assigned to Myanmar as Defense Attache (Army) at the U.S. embassy in Myanmar from 1982 to 1984 with the rank of full colonel. On conclusion of his assignment in Myanmar he went home, retired immediately from the U.S. Army and returned to the Myanmar Thai border. He is military advisor to the KNU, KNPP and the Democratic Party for New Society, personally giving military training and manipulating the armed groups in various ways right up till now.


The Myamar government newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, on February 4, 1995, also reported on Helvey's involvement with insurgent groups then working with opium kingpin Khun Sa.

As the second strategy of the NCUB [National Coalition Union of Burma], it formed the Political Defiance Committee with the objective to use all sorts of subversive acts so that the people will have wrong impressions of the Government and lose their respect on it and so disturbances and upheavals will break out in the country. Thus, they made contacts with underground elements within the country and distributed agitative pamphlets, set off bombs in townships to disturb peace and tranquility and cause disturbances and resorted to other disruptive acts. Those who gave training in political defiance (PD) activities were a former retired U.S. Defence Attache Robert Helvey and one Gene Sharp. It was seen that during the three-year period of extending invitation for peace, the KNU were bent on undermining the interest of the people. KNU Bo Mya sent KNU Lt-Col Law Wadi, demolition expert Lt-Col Saw Isaac, to drug warlord Khun Sa at Home in Camp and had discussions from 10 to 12 April 1994 on cooperation between KNU and MTA, assisting in making land mines and arms and ammunition and other economic cooperation.


THE COUP PLOTTERS

The Albert Einstein Institution

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) has played the key role in recent years in training and deploying youth movements to help prepare the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those regimes through their demonstrations and the like. The group, which is funded by the Soros foundations and the U.S. government, is led by former DIA officer Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr. Gene Sharp.

According to the curriculum vitae and Biographical Profile in the AEI report, Dr Gene Sharp "founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies, and education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in face of dictatorship, war, genocide, and oppression."

Dr. Sharp has held research appointments in Harvard University's Center for International Affairs for nearly 30 years. His writings, which focus on the strategic use of nonviolence in overturning states, have been translated into 27 languages. Through funding provided by the Soros foundations, and through the National Endowment of Democracy and other U.S. government conduits, Sharp and his associates have regularly traveled to targeted regions to facilitate revolutions, since the group's creation.

According to Sharp, "If the issue is to bring down a dictatorship, then it is not good enough to say, 'we want freedom.' It's necessary to develop a strategy, or a super-plan, to weaken a dictatorship and that can only be done by identifying its sources of power. These [sources of power] include: authority, human resources skills, knowledge, tangible factors, economic and material resources and sanctions like police and troops."

For this reason, Sharp reports, he has written numerous books on nonviolent struggle to help oppressed peoples develop a "superplan." These works, of which the major one is "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," have been translated into 27 languages. Among these languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Macedonian, Arabic, Tamil, Burmese, Karen (and several other Burmese minority languages), Thai, Chinese, Korean, as well as French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, and other European languages still spoken in former colonies.

While Sharp is the main theoretician of the group (and officially its senior scholar), its more practical work is overseen by its president, Colonel Robert Helvey, who began working with the center even before officially retiring from the U.S. Army in 1991. A 30-year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey had practical experience in subversive operations throughout Southeast Asia prior to his work with the institution. According to numerous reports, Helvey was the case officer for the U.S.-sponsored coup in Serbia, was deeply involved in similar operations in Georgia, and according to at least one report, was on the ground in the recent coup in Ukraine. A Ukrainian translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy by Sharp has been announced by The Albert Einstein Institution.

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report for the years 2000 to 2004, its mission is to "advance the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action in conflict."

Numerous individuals and organizations interested in the potential of nonviolent struggle contact the Albert Einstein Institution. In recent years, requests for information or advice have come from people involved in conflicts in Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, Vietnam, China, Tibet, West Papua, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

AEI's translation program has been instrumental in expanding our global reach. In the last four years alone, the Albert Einstein Institution's publications have appeared in Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Tibetan, and several ethnic Burmese languages. Additional translations are currently underway in Chinese and Kurdish.


In his letter from the president, Col. Helvey reports:

Strategic nonviolent struggle must be recognized as a subject that can be understood and applied by all who seek to throw off the yoke of governmental oppression ...

The assumption that there is no realistic alternative to violence in extreme situations is contradicted by various cases of important nonviolent struggles in several countries in recent decades. These include Norway, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and others. Many earlier cases of improvised nonviolent struggle occurred and are also relevant. Usually the importance of these history-making nonviolent struggles has been trivialized or ignored. Although there have also been some failures in nonviolent struggle, such as in China and Burma, the fact that these cases could have been waged at all, and that numerous nonviolent struggles have succeeded, is highly important.


International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts has been heavily involved in the new Postmodern Coups, especially through its figures, Dr. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

According to its website, the center "develops and encourages the use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend democracy and human rights worldwide." It "provides assistance in the training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and human rights is possible."

The most significant nonviolent conflicts in the world today, which may lead to "regime changes," it reports, are occurring in Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Chinese Tibet, Belarus, Ukraine [now nearing completion], Palestine, Iran, and Cuba.

Dr. Peter Ackerman is the founding chairman of the center. He is currently the chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, an important U.S. intelligence recruitment center, and is on the Executive Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Dr Ackerman was also a founding director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Dr. Ackerman was the executive producer of the PBS TV documentary, "Bringing Down a Dictator," on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, which has since been translated into Arabic, Farsi, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish. He was also the series editor and principal content advisor behind the PBS TV series, "A Force More Powerful," which documents the use of nonviolence in regime changes. It has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. Ackerman is the co-author of two books on nonviolent resistance: A Force More Powerful (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press 2001), which is a companion book to the television series, and Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger 1994). He regularly lectures on the use of nonviolence in toppling target states, including at the State Department.

Former Air Force officer Jack DuVall is the president of the center, and was one of its founders. Like Dr. Ackerman, DuVall gives frequent lectures nationally and internationally on the strategic use of nonviolence.

The center's vice chairman, Berel Rodal, is the former director-general of the Policy Secretariat of the Canadian Department of National Defence.

The Arlington Institute

The Arlington Institute (TAI), is an apparent strategist in the use of postmodern coups. It was founded in 1989 by John L. Petersen, in order, in his own words, "to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms by introducing the rapidly evolving global trends of population growth, environmental degradation, and science and technology explosion, and social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation." Among its board members are Jack DuVall, the former Air Force officer who is director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, D.C. and James Woolsey, the former Clinton administration CIA director and neocon spokesman who is currently the chairman of Freedom House.

The need for an organization like the Arlington Institute, its website reports, "evolved from the bipartisan, eighteen-month long National Security Group project that Petersen co-founded and jointly led in Washington, D.C., in 1986-7. That ad-hoc group of national security experts was brought together to explore and map the security environment that the successful candidate would have to operate within after the 1988 presidential campaign. Petersen also wrote the final report for the group, 'The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment,' which became a strategy document used at the highest levels of the Department of Defense."

"In the early part of the 90s," it adds, "Petersen was engaged in a number of projects for the Department of Defense which functioned to build a systematic understanding of the major approaches that were then being used to study and anticipate futures. One notable project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense involved traveling throughout the world visiting the foremost practitioners of futures research to assess each methodology and attempt to develop a new, synthetic approach that drew from the best of the then current processes." Petersen became an advisor to a number of senior defense officials during this time, serving in various personal support roles to the undersecretary of the Navy and the chief of Naval Operations, among others.

Midway through the 1990s, it adds, "Petersen became convinced that humanity was living in an extraordinary time of change that would necessarily result in a major global shift within the following two decades. TAI committed itself to playing a significant role in facilitating a global transition to a new world that operates in a fundamentally different way from the past."

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates

Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group to be installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principal, Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.

PSB was founded in 1975, with offices in Washington, D.C., Denver, and New York. It reports it has conducted research in over 65 countries for Fortune 500 companies and major political campaigns.

"PSB is perhaps best known for our work as long-term strategic advisors to Bill Gates and Microsoft," it reports, while in the political world, "the firm is best known for being the long-time strategic advisors to President Bill Clinton and to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others."

The firm reports that it has conducted "a wide variety of government research projects, including recent work for the U.S. State Department in troubled countries overseas." Its business clients have included Siemens, American Express, Eli Lilly, Fleet, Boston Financial, Texaco, BP, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ING Group, DeBeers, and KPMG, among others.

The group touts its role in Serbia. In an article, entitled "Defeating dictators at the ballot box: Lessons on how to develop successful electoral strategy in an authoritarian society," posted on their website, coauthors Penn and Schoen report:

International strategists, political and media consultants such as ourselves have played critical roles behind the scenes of the elections in Serbia and Zimbabwe, helping the opposition parties craft strategies, and messages and organize a credible and effective campaign that has enabled them to weaken the dictator, his political party, and eventually throw him out of power.

The introduction of cutting edge political and communications techniques as well as the advice of the best Western political consultants and image makers, is as potent a weapon as the planes, bombs, and intelligence technology used in such conflicts as the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently Afghanistan.


The firm's role in subverting Serbia was first detailed in the December 11, 2000, Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs, "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition."

In a softly lit conference room, American pollster Doug Schoen flashed the results of an in-depth opinion poll of 84 Serbian voters onto an overhead projection screen, sketching a strategy for toppling Europe's last remaining communist-era ruler.

His message, delivered to leaders of Serbia's traditionally fractious opposition, was simple and powerful. Slobodan Milosevic -- survivor of four lost wars, two major street uprisings, 78 days of NATO bombing and a decade of international sanctions -- was "completely vulnerable" to a well-organized electoral challenge. The key, the poll results showed, was opposition unity.

Held in a luxury hotel in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, in October 1999, the closed-door briefing by Schoen, a Democrat, turned out to be a seminal event, pointing the way to the electoral revolution that brought down Milosevic a year later. It also marked the start of an extraordinary U.S. effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.

Milosevic's strongest political card was the disarray and ineffectiveness of his opponents. The opposition consisted of nearly two dozen political parties, some of whose leaders were barely on speaking terms with one another.

It was against this background that 20 opposition leaders accepted an invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest, overlooking the Danube River. The key item on the agenda: an opinion poll commissioned by the U.S. polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.

The poll reported that Milosevic had a 70 percent unfavorable rating among Serbian voters. But it also showed that the big names in the opposition -- men such as Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Oraskovic -- were burdened with negative poll ratings almost as high as Milosevic's.

Among the candidates best placed to challenge Milosevic, the poll suggested, was a moderate Serbian nationalist named Vojislav Kostunica, who had a favorable rating of 49 percent and an unfavorable rating of only 29 percent.


Schoen, who had provided polling advice to former Yugoslav prime minister Milan Panic during his unsuccessful 1992 campaign to depose Milosevic, drew several conclusions from these and other findings of the poll.... Most important, only a united opposition had a chance of deposing Milosevic. "If you take one word from this conference," Schoen told the delegates, "I urge it to be unity."

Mark Penn has been president of the firm since its founding in 1975. He served as President Clinton's pollster and political adviser for the 1996 re-election campaign and throughout the second term of the administration, including during the period he oversaw the Serbian election campaign which toppled President Milosevic. His influence over the Clinton administration was such that the Washington Post called him "perhaps the most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of." According to the firm's website, Penn helped elect 15 overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe.

Doug Schoen is the firm's founding partner and a principal strategist. According to the firm, Schoen has for the last 20 years "created winning messages and provided strategic advice to numerous political clients in the United States and to heads of state in countries around the world, including Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia." Additionally, he was "President William Jefferson Clinton's research and strategic consultant during the 1996 reelection, and has been widely credited with creating and effectively communicating the message that turned around the president's political fortunes between 1994 and 1996."

Alan Fleischmann, who runs the firm's Washington offices, is described as a "specialist in strategic and crisis communications who has served in domestic and overseas senior management posts in the private and public sectors, specializing in finance, public and foreign policy, marketing, communications, negotiation, mediation, and strategy. Prior to joining the firm, Fleischmann had been staff director of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the United States Congress, and a senior advisor to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Fleischmann has also been a legislative aide to the late German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the German Bundestag."
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Re: OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CAN

Postby admin » Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:41 am

PART 1 OF 2

FORESHADOWINGS OF OBAMA FROM A QUARTER CENTURY AGO

Project Democracy's Program: the Fascist Corporate State

(The following are excerpts from an article by Webster G. Tarpley which appeared in Project Democracy: The Parallel Government Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, published by EIR in April 1987.)

Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name "Project Democracy" to denote their organized efforts to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. It is ironic that so many of the operatives engaged in the name of "democracy" in this insidious, creeping coup d'etat against the United States Constitution should be first and second-generation followers of the Soviet Russian universal fascist, Nikolai Bukharin.

Though ironic, all these propositions are indeed true. Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is the destabilization and the putsch in so many countries around the world can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the U.S. border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.

The greatest obstacle to understanding the monstrous purpose that lurks behind Project Democracy's bland and edifying label is the continued ignorance on the part of the American public of the real nature of 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Despite the fact that Stalin deliberately helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power, despite the Nazi-Communist alliance of 1939-41 under the Hitler Stalin Pact, despite Mussolini's close ties to Moscow, despite the deep affinity between Nazi-fascists and communists demonstrated repeatedly in many countries by mass exchanges of membership between political organizations of the two persuasions, the average American still sees communism and Nazism-fascism as polar opposites. The expression "fascist" exists only as a strongly derogatory but very vague epithet, empty of any precise political content.

"Totalitarianism" is much more than just a dictatorship or authoritarian state. The totalitarian state seeks to dictate the behavior of its inmates down to the most minute detail, and creates for this purpose institutions that will allow that total surveillance and total control. In Byzantine-Orthodox civilization and in the Western totalitarianism copied from it, all departments of human endeavor, including economics, religion, sports, marriage, and even thinking are conceived of as departments of the state. Appropriate institutions are required to mediate totalitarian control in each of these areas.

In totalitarianism both the individual and society disappear into the maw of the all-consuming Moloch, the state.

A DEFINITION OF FASCISM

Starting from these premises, it is possible to furnish a rough definition of modern fascism or Nazi-communism, the regime toward which Project Democracy is working. That definition contains the following elements:

1. Totalitarian fascism starts as a radical mass movement sponsored by bankers which, if it is able to seize power, produces a regime or governing system which seeks to mutilate, mortify, and crush the conception of the individual. As in the writings of Mussolini's ideologue, Giovanni Gentile, or in the ravings of Michael Ledeen, the aspirations of the individual are rigidly subordinated to the exigencies of the regime.

[Srdja Popovic, Revolution Trainer] One of the tricks is making everybody busy. Because when people are busy, they don't have time to be afraid. This sounds crazy, but this is exactly what they do in the military training. Okay?

Image

So the way you do it in non-violent struggle is actually you create this group identity. You want people to feel each other. You want people to be dressed in similar clothes. You want people to sing, because songs make them work together. You will have drums there that will give the rhythm to your march. You want whistles; you want music; you want fun. This is a very important part. Now it looks like a big love parade.

-- The Revolution Business, by Patrick A. Hafner, Alexander Steinbach -- Screenplay


2. The fascist regime is a government controlled in practice by a single party -- a one-party state.

3. Fascist ideology, whatever its specific predicates, repudiates human reason and exalts irrationalism and irrationalist violence, often in the form of wanton military aggression and imperialism. A fascist mass movement is the most aggressive form of militant irrationalism. From Mussolini's romanita through Hitler's Herrenvolk, fascist ideology is based on notions of racial superiority and race hatred, extreme chauvinism, and blood and soil mysticism. Fascism is neo pagan and ferociously hostile to Augustinian Christianity, as can be shown from Mussolini's early career and from Hitler's private conversations.

4. Fascist economics is the murderous austerity associated with the names of Hitler's finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and Mussolini's finance minister, Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata. The final logic of fascist economics is the concentration camp, the labor camp, the Gulag. Fascist irrationalism cannot tolerate scientific rationality on a broad scale, and is therefore correlated with hostility to technological innovation, and permanent peasant backwardness in agriculture.

5. The institutions through which totalitarian control of economic life is mediated merit special attention. In totalitarian regimes in the Western world, masses of labor have often been simply dragooned through institutions such as Dr. Ley's Nazi Labor Front. But the characteristic institutions of fascism in the West are those of the so-called corporate state. In the fascist regime of Italy, Vichy France, and many others, it was the corporations which were to bring together ownership and employees, management and labor under the direct control of the one-party state, for the purpose of extending totalitarian domination into the nooks and crannies of everyday economic life, while at the same time fragmenting potentially rebellious workers along the lines of branches of industry.

THE CORPORATIST PRINCIPLE

This corporatist principle in fascism is so neglected and misunderstood that it merits our special attention, especially because the form of fascist totalitarianism which Project Democracy aims at is of a corporatist variety. The word corporation here has nothing to do with its usual English meaning of a joint-stock company. "Corporation" here means, approximately, a guild. For present purposes it is enough to recall that corporatism emerged as an irrational, solidarist opposition to capitalism and the United States Constitution during the period of the reactionary Holy Alliance after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Corporatism asserted that the way to overcome the tensions between labor and capital was not through the broad national community of interest prescribed by Alexander Hamilton's American System of dirigist political economy, but rather through the artificial creation of medieval guild organizations, based on the pretense that capitalists were masters, and workers were journeymen and apprentices, all functioning together in "organic" unity.

Thus, Mussolini advertised his fascist regime as the stato corporativo or corporate state, proclaiming that "O ilfascismo sara corporativo o non sara" (fascism is corporative or it is nothing). In German, the equivalent for statocorporativo is Standestaat, wherein Stand has the meaning of estate or social group in the sense of aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie, which along with the peasantry were the four "estates" of pre-revolutionary France. Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party was corporatist from the very beginning: point 25 of the "unalterable" program of the Nazis as adopted on Feb. 25, 1910 included the "creation of corporative and professional chambers" (Die Bildung von Stande und Berufskammem zur Durchfuhrung der vom Reiche erlassenen Rahmengesetze in den einzelnen Bundesstaaten.) [Note 1] For a certain period after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, his regime referred to itself prominently as a Standestaat, or corporate state. When Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval created their Nazi puppet-state in Vichy, Petain announced that one of the principal goals of his "national regeneration movement" was the creation of an ordre corporatif. Other fascist regimes, especially the many that were directly modeled on the Italian one, also stressed corporatism, so that corporatism emerges as the characteristic institutional structure of fascism.

Theories of the corporate state can be traced back to Germans like Pesch and Kettler, or to the "guild socialism" of the Englishman William Morris. An early attempt to actually create a corporate state came in 1919, with the filibustering expedition to Fiume of Gabriele D'Annunzio, the proto fascist of our epoch.

D'ANNUNZIO AS SEEN BY LEDEEN

The corporate state D'Annunzio attempted to create during his Fiume adventure is of double relevance to an analysis of the fascism of Project Democracy. On the one hand, D'Annunzio's 16-month tenure as dictator in Fiume was the model and dress rehearsal for Mussolini's March on Rome. On the other hand, D'Annunzio's activities in Fiume have been the subject of a lengthy treatise by the most overt and blatantly fascist ideologue of Project Democracy, Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen's discussion of D'Annunzio in Fiume is to be found in his book, The First Duce. Ledeen celebrates the poetaster D'Annunzio as the founder not only of fascism, but of 20th-century politics in general, through his creation of a Nazi-communist mass movement of irrationalism:

Virtually the entire ritual of Fascism came from the "Free State of Fiume": the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of "aia, aia, alala," the dramatic dialogues with the crowd, the use of religious symbols in a new secular setting, the eulogies of the "martyrs" of the cause and the employment of their "relics" in political ceremonies. Moreover, quite aside from the poet's contribution to the form and style of fascist politics, Mussolini's movement first started to attract great strength when the future dictator supported D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume. (p. viii)

D'Annunzio's political style -- the politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth and symbol, have become the norm in the modern world. All too often politicians and parties have lost sight of the point of departure of our political behavior, believing that by now ours is the normal political universe and that the manipulation of the masses is essential in the political process.

D' Annunzian Fiume seems to have marked a sort of watershed in this process, and that is perhaps the explanation for the fascinating symbiosis between themes of the "Right" and the "Left" in the rhetoric of the comandante. It is of the utmost importance for us to remind ourselves that D'Annunzio's political appeal ranged from extreme Left to extreme Right, from leaders of the Russian Revolution to arch-reactionaries. (p. 202)

Michael Ledeen is especially fascinated by D'Annunzio's ability to recreate an "organic" unity out of the disparate elements of modern society: "At the core of D'Annunzian politics was the insight that many conflicting interests could be overcome and transcended in a new kind of movement." (p. ix) For Ledeen, the key institutional feature of the D'Annunzian fascist order is the corporate state.

The city of Fiume lies at the southern base of the Istrian peninsula, at the north end of the Adriatic Sea, across from Venice. In 1919 it was a former territory of the newly defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire under dispute between Italy and the new nation of Yugoslavia, where the town is located today under the name of Rieka. Italy, having participated in the victorious cause of the Allies, desired to annex Fiume as it had the other Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste, but the weak Nitti ministry hesitated to do so because of the opposition of France. France at that time was determined to emerge as the protector of the new states created in the Balkans by the Peace of Paris, and therefore supported the Yugoslav claim to Fiume, which the Yugoslavs saw as a key port. In order to force the hand of Nitti, D'Annunzio, starting from Venice, gathered a force of arditi, veterans of the elite shock troops of the Italian army, and seized Fiume in September 1919, demanding that Italy annex it. D'Annuzio's regime, which he sometimes called a Regency, organized acts of terrorism and piracy. In November 1920, with the Treaty of Rapallo, Fiume was made a free city. D'Annunzio refused to accept this solution and Italian troops dispersed his "legions" some time later.

The Fiume expedition was a classic example of Venetian cultural-political warfare, designed as a pilot project for fascist movements and coups in the aftermath of the hecatomb of the First World War. The centerpiece of the operation was the so-called Charter of Camaro (Carta del Carnaro), the corporatist guild constitution for Fiume as an independent city, written by D'Annunzio in collaboration with the anarcho-syndicalist agitator Alceste de Ambris.

The Carta del Carnaro was reminiscent of certain features of the Venetian Republic. Legislative power was vested in a bicameral legislature. One house was called the Consiglio degli Ottimi, or Council of the Best, and was elected on the basis of universal direct suffrage with one councilor per every thousand inhabitants. The Ottimi were to handle legislation regarding civil and criminal justice, police, the armed forces, education, intellectual life, and were also to govern the relations between the central government and subdivisions or states, called communes.

The corporate chamber of the Fiume parliament was to be the Consiglio dei Provvisori, a kind of economic council. The Consiglio dei Provvisori was composed of representatives of nine guilds or corporations whose creation was also provided for in the document. These included the industrial and agricultural workers, the seafarers, and the employers, with 10 representatives each; the industrial and agricultural technicians, private bureaucrats and administrators, teachers and students, lawyers and doctors, civil servants, and cooperative workers, with five representatives from each group, for a grand total of 60. The Consiglio dei Provvisori was responsible for all laws regarding business and commerce. It also decided all matters touching labor, public services, transportation and the merchant marine, tariffs and trade, public works, and medical and legal practice.

The Ottimi served for a term of three years, and the Provvisori for two years. A third legislative body was prescribed, formed through the joint session of the Ottimi and Provvisori: This was called the Arengo del Carnaro, and was to deal with treaties with foreign states, the budget, university affairs, and amendments to the constitution.

The Provvisori were chosen by nine corporations. Membership in one of these corporations was obligatory for all citizens, and was posited in the Carta del Carnaro as an indispensable precondition for citizenship. The article on corporations states that "only the assiduous producers of the common wealth and the assiduous producers of the common strength are complete citizens of the Regency, and with it constitute a single working substance, a single ascendant fullness." (Ledeen, p. 166) D'Annunzio's corporations are horizontal, similar to the estates, and are not organized according to vertical branches or cycles of economic activity, as Mussolini's corporations were to be.

The Carla del Carnaro provides for a 10th corporation, which seems to have been reserved for geniuses, prophets, and assorted supermen. D'Annunzio's conception of the corporation is almost tribal, as the text of the constitution shows. He stipulated that each corporation was to "invent its insignia, its emblems, its music, its chants, its prayers; institute its ceremonies and rites; participate, as magnificently as it can, in the common joys, the anniversary festivals, and the maritime and terrestrial games; venerate its dead, honor its leaders, and celebrate its heroes." (Ledeen, p. 168)

The executive power was normally vested in seven rectors or ministers (including foreign affairs, treasury, education, police and justice, defense, public economy, and labor). For periods of emergency, it was provided that the Arengo could appoint a dictator or comandante for a specified term, as was the custom in the Roman Republic. There was also a judiciary, with communal courts (Buoni uomini, or good men), a labor court (giudici del lavoro), civil courts (giudici togati, or judges in toga) a criminal court (giudici del maleficio), and a supreme court called the Corte della Ragione, or court of reason.

For Ledeen, D'Annunzio assumes the status of Nazi-communist prophet of the mass irrationalism of the 20th century. For Ledeen, the Carta del Carnaro sums up the "essence of European radical socialism." From the point of view of Ledeen's universal fascism, D'Annunzio is located in the same tradition as the classics of Marxism and historical materialism, since his writings conjure up the Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The young Marx, like many other heirs of Hegelianism, had been engaged in the search for a way to end human "alienation," and D'Annunzio saw the structure created by the Carta as a means of organizing a society in which human creativity would blossom in a way rarely seen in the story of mankind. It is by no means accidental that he employed the language of the Communes [Italian city-states of the 1200s] in his new constitution, for he wished to recreate in the regency of Fiume the ferment of activity that had produced the Renaissance. He hoped that this constitution would produce a new, unalienated man." (Ledeen, pp. 168-9)

In reality, D'Annunzio was a degenerate monster, a coprophile, pervert, and psychopath -- qualities that may have helped to determine Ledeen's compulsive affinity for this hideous figure. The Venetian operative D'Annunzio, the "John the Baptist" of fascism in this century, must bear a great share of the responsibility for opening the door to the Nazi-communist chamber of horrors in the epoch during and after the First World War. Ledeen's commitment to the creation of a universal fascist yoke has found its appropriate organizational expression in Project Democracy.

MUSSOLINI'S CORPORATE STATE

After the March on Rome in 1912, and especially after the consolidation of a full-blown dictatorship through the coup d'etat of 1925, the Kingdom of Italy saw the creation of the fascist corporate state. The promise of creating corporations figured prominently in Mussolini's demagogy from the beginning of his campaign for the seizure of power, but the creation of the corporations and the transformation of the parliament in order to include them was a long and drawn-out process that was completed only in the late thirties, at the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War.

One of the reasons it took so long to found the corporations was the lack of agreement about what these artificial creations might in fact be, since they had to be invented ex novo. Mussolini in the end settled on the idea that each corporation was to represent, not a stratum of society, but rather a branch of industry. The essence of the fascist corporations was that they were a support and appendage of the personal rule of Il Duce, and thus of the one-party fascist state. As one historian has observed:

"The fundamental truth, however, is that the Fascist State claims the right to regulate economic as well as other aspects of life, and has aimed at accomplishing the former through the Corporate organization. The Dictatorship is the necessary rack and screw of the Corporate system; all the rest is subordinate machinery." [Note 2]

Mussolini rejected both the Marxist idea of class conflict as well as what he called economic liberalism. The corporate system was designed, in his view, to overcome the class struggle of the one and the exaggerated economic individualism of the other. All of this was supposed to mobilize and focus national energies in the service of the superior interest of the state as the overarching collectivity. In one speech, II Duce summed up the three elements of revolutionary corporatism as a single party, a totalitarian state, and "the highest ideal tension." In fact, Mussolini danced to the tune of Venetian financiers like Volpi di Misurata, Cini, and others.

Mussolini situated the need for corporations in the context of the dissolution of the world capitalist system -- an interesting parallel to the corporatist fascism of Project Democracy and the Trilateral Commission, which are explicitly proposed as necessities for a post-industrial era of scarce and diminishing resources. In 1933, Mussolini announced that the world depression (or the "American crisis," as he also called it) had become a total crisis of the world capitalist system. He went on to distinguish three periods in the history of capitalism: "the dynamic, the static, and the declining." According to Mussolini, the dynamic era of capitalism extended from the introduction of the widespread use of the steam engine to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870; this period he saw as the time of unfettered free enterprise. After 1870, came a static phase, with the growth of trusts, the end of free competition, and smaller profit margins. The third or decadent phase is described by Mussolini as a kind of state capitalism. Mussolini described the system in these terms: "The outcome is the necessity for corporatism: Today we are burying economic liberalism, and the Corporation plays that part in the economic field, which the Grand Council and the Militia [the squadristi] do in the political. Corporatism means a disciplined, and therefore a controlled economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled. Corporatism overcomes Socialism as well as it does liberalism: it creates a new synthesis." (Finer, pp. 501-502)

The juridical basis for the fascist corporations is established in the Charter of Labor of 1927, whose sixth article states: "The corporations constitute the unitary organization of production and represent completely its interests. In view of this complete representation, the interests of production being national interests, the corporations are recognized by law as organs of the State." [Note 3] The regime created fascist labor unions for workers, which had the monopoly of representation of labor in the negotiation of the national labor contract for each category or branch of economic activity. The Confindustria was created as the sole syndicate of the employers. No labor contract was considered valid until it had been approved by the Ministry for Corporations.

In 1934, Mussolini finally issued a decree-law creating 22 corporations for the principal sectors of the Italian economy. Each corporation was given a council, which was composed of equal numbers of representatives of the fascist labor union and the fascist employers' organization for that sector, plus representatives of the National Fascist Party, the Ministry of Corporations, and consulting technocrats. The president of each corporation was generally a top official of the government or of the Fascist Party. The leading task of each corporation was the reconciliation of disputes between labor and management.

Each corporation represented a "productive cycle" rather than an occupational category. A first group of corporations included agricultural, industrial, and commercial elements. These were the corporations for: cereals; garden products, flowers, and fruits; vineyards and wine; oils; beets and sugar; animal industries and fishing; wood; and textile products. A second group of eight corporations included only commercial and industrial elements. These were: metallurgy and mechanics; chemical industries; clothing and accessories; paper and the press; building construction; water, gas, and electricity; extractive industries; and glass and ceramics. A third group of corporations made up the service sector: insurance and credit; professions and arts; sea and air transportation; internal communications; show business; and tourism and hotels.

In the early stages of the regime, corporate representatives were brought together at the national level in a National Council of Corporations, and a National Assembly of Corporations, which were later superseded by a Central Corporate Committee. All of these contained party and government representatives in addition to the corporate delegates. Councils of Corporate Economy were also set up in each province as a kind of fascist chamber of commerce, with all the corporations of the province plus local governments being represented.

In 1938, after having proclaimed that he considered the Chamber of Deputies, which until that time had been the lower house of the Italian Parliament, as belonging to the alien residue of liberalism, Mussolini replaced that Chamber with the Chamber of the Fasces and Corporations (Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni). This was composed of a number of delegates appointed by each of the corporations, plus other delegates appointed by the National Fascist Party.

Mussolini summed up these institutional transformations with the following words: "We have constituted a Corporative and Fascist State, the State of national society, a State which concentrates, controls, harmonizes, and tempers the interests of all social classes, which are thereby protected in equal measure. Whereas, during the years of demo-liberal regime, labor looked with diffidence upon the State, and was, in fact, outside the State and against the State, and considered the State an enemy of every day and every hour, there is not one working Italian today who does not seek a place in his Corporation or syndical federation, who does not wish to be a living atom of that great, immense living organization which is the national Corporate State of Fascism." (Field, p. 16)

After the cataclysm of the Mussolini regime, former members of the fascist hierarchy who considered themselves in the syndicalist-corporate tradition, such as Giuseppe Bottai, accused Mussolini of having been instinctively inclined to preserve his personal dictatorship, rather than transform that dictatorship into a true corporatist system. From beginning to end, the corporations were in fact the merest paraphernalia of Il Duce's one-party state. Although he actually functioned as a malleable puppet of Volpi di Misurata and the Venetian financiers, in the eyes of the world Mussolini stood atop the fascist edifice as Duce of Fascism and Head of Government, and the secretary of the National Fascist Party served at his pleasure. An important organ of this totalitarian dictatorship was the Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Consiglio del Fascismo), primarily an expression of the fascist party, but in its makeup a mixed organ composed of top officials of the National Fascist Party, government ministers, the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the commander of the squadristi, and others. As long as the Chamber of Deputies lasted, it was the Grand Council which made up the single nationwide list of Fascist candidates which the voters were called upon to accept or reject as a single unitary slate. The Grand Council was also responsible for submitting to the King the names of persons who might be selected as Head of Government. It was this Grand Council which, in July 1943, decided to oust Mussolini.

As will be shown later, the National Endowment for Democracy is not only corporatist, but its board of directors is intended to function as a kind of informal Grand Council of Fascism in the totalitarian one-party state that Project Democracy seeks to create in the United States.

After seizing power, Mussolini institutionalized and domesticated his storm troopers, the squadristi, under the name of the Voluntary National Security Militia, which was an organ of the Fascist Party. To combat political resistance to his regime, Mussolini then set up Special Tribunals whose judges were all high officers of the squadristi militia. Perhaps Ledeen or other Project Democracy theorists can take this as a starting point for the reform of the U.S. federal judiciary.

Mussolini claimed to justify his regime through the need for efficiency and getting things done effectively. The Second World War revealed the overwhelming logistical and military weakness of the fascist corporate state. Despite the failure of corporatism in its declared aims of generating economic and military power, corporatist forms have exercised an almost hypnotic fascination over certain financier cliques in times of grave economic crisis. As we will see, the Trilateral Commission is committed to a neo-corporate order for the United States.

At this point in the argument, certain readers may become impatient with an argument that seems to them to be incongruous. Can it be that the business-suited bankers of the Trilateral Commission, the shirt-sleeve bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO, or even such figures as Oliver North share decisive elements of their ideology with a black-shirted, jack-booted, strutting fascist like Mussolini, with fez, dagger, and club, with jaw jutting over the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia? Are not the present-day figures of Project Democracy too bland to qualify as fascists? Are they not just American pragmatists with views that may happen to differ from our own?

It may come as a surprise to many that Mussolini himself was a professed follower of American pragmatism. Among the thinkers who had made the greatest contribution to his own intellectual formation, Il Duce numbered first of all William James, the classic exponent of American pragmatism, whom he knew especially through the Italian writer Papini. Then came Machiavelli (for window-dressing, since he was certainly not a pragmatist and clearly not understood by Il Duce), followed by Nietzsche, an authentic proto-fascist who can be considered as representing a slightly different school of pragmatism. Then came the French anarcho-syndicalist, Georges Sorel, the theorist of purgative violence and also a declared pragmatist.

During the long reign of Queen Victoria and her son Prince Edward Albert (later King Edward VII), American collaborators of the Fabian circles, typified by William James (1842-1910), developed intimate relations with British Fabian institutions including the "Cambridge Apostles", the Royal Colonial Institute and its associated Scottish Rite Freemasonic Lodge (now the Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs), the Society for Psychical Research, the H.G. Wells-allied New Republic magazine, and others.

As the founding chairman of Harvard University's Psychology Department, James helped launch a new dimension of religious insanity, beyond the earlier episodic "Great Awakenings." In a famous series of lectures at Edinburgh University, published under the title Varieties of Religious Experience, he proposed that Edwards' type of terror-induced "religious experience" be enhanced with drugs. "Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration," he argued, were necessary for creative thought, including a sense of the spiritual. He pointed out that drunkenness has been traditionally the best way to "get religion," but added the suggestion that nitrous oxide, ether, and other drugs ought also to be used.

In these lectures, James also promoted the British oligarchy-sponsored occultist Theosophical movement of Madame Blatvatsky and Annie Besant, and other strange religions which had been promoted to prominence after the Civil War.

-- The CCF and the God of Thunder Cult, by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg


All pragmatists are not necessarily fascists, but in the 20th century many have been, and there is no doubt that all fascists are pragmatists. In a crisis of civilization like the one of the 1980s, the fascists constitute the fastest-growing component of the pragmatic school. This makes it possible for individuals like Oliver North and Carl Gershman to embrace fascism as a simple practical expedient.

In one of his speeches, Mussolini remarked: "The second foundation stone of Fascismo is represented by anti-demagogism and pragmatism." William Yandell Elliott of Harvard University remarks in his study of post-World War I political irrationalism, entitled The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: "For pragmatism, a myth is true so long as it works. Mussolini offers himself as the new Caesar if he can capture the imagination of Italians and inflame them with his dream, he feels that he can govern with consent." (p. 341) Elliott, it should be recalled, was one of the principal teachers of Henry Kissinger.

William James had posited this "working test of truth," which was also reflected in Mussolini's celebrated contempt for programs. When asked for a program, he replied: "Our program is simple: We wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many of them." For Mussolini, program was a part of liberalism's "government by talk," which he was determined to extirpate. In 1932, Mussolini wrote: "La mia dottrina era stata la dottrina dell'azione. Il fascismo nacque da un bisogno d'azione efu azione." (My doctrine had been the doctrine of action. Fascism was born of the need for action, and was action.) Oliver North would presumably agree.
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Re: OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CAN

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PART 2 OF 2

THE TRILATERALS' U.S. CORPORATE STATE

From the moment of its inception about a dozen years ago, the operational network known today as Project Democracy has had as its goal the subversion of the United States constitutional order in favor of a one-party, totalitarian and corporatist fascist regime, combining the horrors of the historical precursors depicted so far. One aspect of these efforts by Project Democracy has involved the creation of an extensive and lawless invisible government, as has already been made clear in this report. But beyond all this, Project Democracy aims at definite changes in the structure of the government and institutions of the United States, of a kind so extensive that they could not be accomplished without a virtual obliteration of the Constitution. The starting point for this totalitarian plan was the Trilateral Commission, an organization created for the purpose of executing the policy of oligarchical and financier groupings making up the American, European, and Japanese branches of the banking elite.

The Trilateral Commission was founded in the wake of Watergate and the oil crisis of 1973, events which the future Trilateral commissars had connived to create. One of the earliest projects of the Trilateral Commission was a study on the "ungovernability" of modern democracy in an era of economic crisis and social upheaval. This project was directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the director of the Trilateral Commission. One of the results of this project that later came into the public domain was a book entitled The Crisis of Democracy by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. It is to be assumed that the published version of this study and its appendices is a very diluted rendering of the discussions that went on among the rapporteurs and the Trilateral commissars. The Crisis of Democracy was a part of the agenda at the yearly meeting of the Trilateral Commission that took place in Tokyo, Japan on May 31, 1975. This was the same Trilateral meeting at which the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, was presented by FIAT chief Gianni Agnelli, and appointed by the commissars to be the next President of the United States.

The starting point of The Crisis of Democracy is the collapse of such economic progress as had characterized the 1960s, and the advent of the post-industrial society. Brzezinski's introduction compares the atmosphere of 1975 with the early 1920s, when Oswald Spengler published his mystical Untergang des Abendlandes, or The Decline of the West. The three authors start off their analysis by quoting Willy Brandt, as he was about to step down as German Federal Chancellor in 1974, saying, "Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference." Then there is a quote from an unnamed senior British official to the effect that if the United Kingdom fails to solve the problem of simultaneous inflation and economic depression, "parliamentary democracy would ultimately be replaced by a dictatorship." There is also a warning from Prime Minister Takeo Miki that "Japanese democracy will collapse" unless the confidence of the people in their political leaders can be restored. This is all related by the authors to the economic dimension of the crisis:

This pessimism about the future of democracy has coincided with a parallel pessimism about the future of economic conditions. Economists have discovered the fifty-year Kondratieff cycle, according to which 1971 (like 1921) should have marked the beginning of a sustained economic downturn from which the industrialized capitalist world would not emerge until the end of the century. The implication is that just as the political developments of the 1920s and 1930s furnished the ironic and tragic aftermath of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy, so also the 1970s and 1980s might furnish a similarly ironic political aftermath to twenty years of sustained economic development designed in part to make the world prosperous enough for democracy. (pp. 2-3)


Added to this obvious implication that economic depression would prove fatal to democratic forms by creating the necessary preconditions for fascist mass movements was the related idea that the United States Constitution could be overthrown in the aftermath of military defeat by the Soviet Union or perhaps by another power. The Trilateral meeting in question, it should be recalled, was taking place just a few weeks after the fall of Saigon. The Trilateral authors make this point as follows: "With the most active foreign policy of any democratic country, the United States is far more vulnerable to defeats in that area than other democratic governments, which, attempting less, also risk less. Given the relative decline in its military, economic, and political influence, the United States is more likely to face serious military or diplomatic reverses during the coming years than at any previous time in its history. If this does occur, it could pose a traumatic shock to American democracy." (p. 5)

In addition to these crisis factors, the study also points to dynamics considered internal to the political process which are generating instability: "Yet, in recent years, the operations of the democratic process do indeed appear to have generated a breakdown of traditional means of social control, a de-legitimation of political and other forms of authority, and an overload of demands on government exceeding its capacity to respond." (p. 8)

The study itself makes clear that the three Trilateral commissars are especially concerned about the economic demands made upon elected representatives by constituency groups which may contradict the austerity and primacy of debt service demanded by oligarchical financier factions.

This theme dominates the chapter on the United States contributed by Samuel P. Huntington, who at various times has been a manager of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the international network associated with Henry Kissinger. Huntington writes according to the canons of empirical social science, but the basic dictatorial intent nevertheless shines through. He describes the two great leaps in the expenditures of the U.S. federal government, the Defense Shift of the 1950s and the Welfare Shift of the1960s. He concludes that after these two shifts had vastly increased federal spending, the student revolt of the 1960s plus Watergate combined to produce "a substantial increase in government activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority. By the early 1970s Americans were progressively demanding and receiving more benefits from their government and yet having less confidence in their government than they had a decade earlier." "The expansion of government activities produced doubts about the economic solvency of government; the decrease in governmental authority produced doubts about the political solvency of government." (p. 64) Reading ex contrario, it emerges that Huntington's ideal government would be an authoritarian regime capable of imposing drastic austerity. His problem is his despair that the U.S. government will fill the bill.

Increased government spending is leading to high deficits, even as public confidence in government declines, says Huntington. He is especially concerned about the "decay of the party system," with the decline in clear party identification among the majority of the citizenry, the rise of split-ticket voting, and a decrease in party loyalty from one election to the next. As for the political parties themselves, Huntington's finding is that "the popular attitude towards parties combines both disapproval and contempt." (p. 87) Huntington also sees a decline in the mass base of the parties, plus a decline in the power of party organization. This raises the specter of a successful political challenge to the power of people like the members of Trilateral Commission: "The lesson of the 1960s was that American political parties were extraordinarily open and extraordinarily vulnerable organizations, in the sense that they could be easily penetrated, and even captured, by highly motivated and well-organized groups with a cause and a candidate." (p. 89)

Huntington is willing to explore the alternative that the political parties may have to be done away with: "It could be argued that political parties are a political form peculiarly suited to the needs of industrial society and that the movement of the United States into a post-industrial phase hence means the end of the party system as we have known it." "In less developed countries, the principal alternative to party government is military government. Do the highly developed countries have a third alternative?" (p. 91)

Huntington sees the entire government in crisis, with congressmen falling prey to the rising expectations of their constituents while the presidency is in decline. Part of the latter problem is that a presidential candidate needs to assemble an electoral coalition of voters in order to win the White House, but must then assemble a governing coalition of various power brokers. Huntington views the two processes as perhaps antithetical.

The recommendations that conclude the analysis of the crisis in U.S. democracy include such pabulum as "moderation in democracy," more authoritarianism, and the need for greater apathy on the part of the population. "Democracy is more of a threat to itself in the United States," writes Huntington.

The real conclusions reached by the Trilateral Commission were doubtless more far-reaching, as can be inferred from the appendices of the book. When the Crozier-Huntington-Watanuki study was presented to the commission, it was introduced by Ralf Dahrendorf, the head of the London School of Economics. The chief thread running through Dahrendorf's remarks was that Huntington had neglected corporatist elements in his prescription. Dahrendorf's argument deserves to be quoted at some length:

Democratic governments find it difficult to cope with the power of extra-parliamentary institutions which determine by their decisions the life chances of as many (or in some cases more) people as the decisions of governments can possibly determine in many of our countries. Indeed, these extra-parliamentary institutions often make governmental power look ridiculous. When I talk about extra-parliamentary institutions, I am essentially thinking of two powerful economic institutions -- giant companies and large and powerful trade unions.

The greater demand for participation, the removal of effective political spaces from the national to the international level, and the removal of the power to determine people's life chances from political institutions to other institutions are all signs of what might be called the dissolution of the general political public which we assumed was the basis of real democratic institutions in the past. Instead of there being an effective political public in democratic countries from which representative institutions emerge and to which representative institutions are answerable, there is a fragmented public and in part a nonexistent public. There is a rather chaotic picture in the political communities of many democratic countries.

My main point here is that as we think about a political public in our day, we cannot simply think of a political public of individual citizens exercising their common sense interests on the marketplace, as it were. In rethinking the notion of the political public, we have to accept the fact that most human beings today are both individual citizens and members of large organizations. We have to accept the fact that most individuals see their interests cared for not only by an immediate expression of their citizenship rights (or even by political parties which organize groups of interests) but also by organizations which at this moment act outside the immediate political framework and which will continue to act whether governments like it or not.

And I believe, therefore, somewhat reluctantly, that in thinking about the political public of tomorrow we shall have to think of a public in which representative parliamentary institutions are somehow linked with institutions which in themselves are neither representative nor parliamentary. I think it is useful to discuss the exact meaning of something like an effective social contract, or perhaps a "Concerted Action" or "Conseil economique et social" for the political institutions of advanced democracies. I do not believe that free collective bargaining is an indispensable element of a free and democratic society. I do believe, however, that we have to recognize that people are organized in trade unions, that there are large enterprises, that economic interests have got to be discussed somewhere, and that there has got to be a negotiation about some of the guidelines by which our economies are functioning. This discussion should be related to representative institutions. There may be a need for reconsidering some of our institutions in this light, not to convert our countries into corporate states, certainly not, but to convert them into countries which in a democratic fashion recognize some of the new developments which have made the effective political public so much less effective in recent years.


For a reader who has followed the exposition up to this point, not much comment is necessary. Despite his very explicit disclaimer, Dahrendorf is indeed talking about a covert and overt institutional transformation toward a corporate state. We have seen several previous attempts to accomplish exactly what he is proposing here. One was D'Annunzio's Consiglio dei Provvisori, and another was Mussolini's Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni. But the Trilateral Commission still needed a means of transition to corporatist rule. It was momentarily to propose it in the form of Project Democracy.

The appendix to The Crisis of Democracy also contains a series of formal concluding statements by the Trilateral Commission at the close of debate on the ungovernability report. At a certain point, the text turns toward question of workers' self-management, co-determination (Mitbestimmung) as practiced in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the need for new modes of organization to alleviate the tensions that characterize post-industrial society. At that point, a new heading is introduced, as follows:

"7. Creation of New Institution for the Cooperative Promotion of Democracy. The effective working of democratic government in the Trilateral societies can now no longer be taken for granted. The increasing demands and pressures on democratic government and the crisis in governmental resources and public authority require more explicit collaboration. One might consider, therefore, means of securing support and resources from foundations, business corporations, labor unions, political parties, civic associations, and, where possible and appropriate, government agencies, for the creation of an institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions. The purpose of such an institute would be to stimulate collaborative studies of common problems involved in the operations of democracy in the Trilateral societies, to promote cooperation among institutions and groups with common concerns in this area among the Trilateral regions, and to encourage the Trilateral societies to learn from each other's experience how to make democracy function more effectively in their societies. There is much which each society can learn from the others. Such mutual learning experiences are familiar phenomena in the economic and military fields; they must also be encouraged in the political field. Such an institute could also serve a useful function in calling attention to questions of special urgency, as, for instance, the critical nature of the problems currently confronting democracy in Europe." (p. 187)

With that, Project Democracy was unleashed against the world.

In the final discussion that followed Dahrendorf's remarks, the task of the new institute was made clearer. One participant suggested that Dahrendorf's idea of associating non-parliamentary groups with the parliamentary process ought to be seen in relation to international political systems, and not just in a national framework. At the close, "one Commissioner [Was it David Rockefeller?] expressed his support 'very concretely' for the proposed institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions." (p. 203)

TRANSFORMING THE POLITICAL PARTIES

Project Democracy is thus by pedigree an international fascist-corporatist organization designed to supplant democratic constitutional republics with veiled and overt fascist regimes. It is a kind of bankers' Comintern -- the Comintern of Bukharin, to be sure. As some of the citations adduced here suggest, it appears that one of the first tasks contemplated for the nascent Project Democracy network was the fomenting of coups d'etat in Western Europe, as was also indicated by abundant empirical evidence manifest at that time.

What is the nature of Project Democracy's planned institutional transformation for the United States? Project Democracy intends to complete the evolution of the Republican and Democratic parties, especially the Democrats, away from their previous status as mass-based political machines responsive to the demands of constituencies and regional and local interests. Under the pretext of increasing the cohesion and responsibility of the parties, they are to acquire dictatorial control over the votes and opinions of elected officials, as for example, congressmen. The two parties are to become increasingly remote from the citizenry, and subjected to an increasingly authoritarian top-down control. Candidates are to become more and more like party functionaries, and are to be chosen by a tiny group of party leaders acting in synergy with the finance oligarchs. This will include presidential candidates most emphatically. Primary elections are to be gradually abolished in favor of a fascist-corporatist smoke-filled room.

The specifically corporatist dimension of such a system in evolution from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is provided by the merger of the AFL-CIO top bureaucracy with the fused Democratic and Republican National Committees and fundraising apparatus. Despite the decline in the relative weight of trade unions in the U.S. workforce, the AFL-CIO is still by far the largest membership organization in the United States. This kind of troika is accurately reflected on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. The AFL-CIO, by virtue of its close interfaces with the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Labor Department, the Commerce Department, the Special Trade Representative, and the intelligence community, is virtually a government agency, precisely in the way that Bukharin wanted trade unions to be. By closely controlling the financing of candidates, access to the media, party endorsement, candidate debates, and the related election apparatus, the backers of Project Democracy think that they can in effect choose the Congress and choose the President.

In this proposed silent putsch by Project Democracy, the RNC/DNC/AFL-CIO lockstep would acquire sovereignty over the U.S. federal government, in much the same way that the Soviet Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat control the Soviet Council of Ministers and Supreme Soviet. For Project Democracy, it is much more convenient for sovereignty to be located in an informal combine of private organizations, which cannot be subjected to government oversight, Freedom of Information Act demands, or financial audit and accountability, but which can and do receive large amounts of official government funding, as well as the largesse conduited through Oliver North's Swiss bank accounts.

At the same time, Project Democracy is well aware of the value of maintaining a facade of respect for constitutional forms during the time in which the passage from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is being negotiated. It can be recalled that it took Mussolini some three years to go from head of the government to dictator, and still longer for the full institutional panoply of the totalitarian state to be set forth. In that transition, the suppression of opposition political groups and publishing enterprises was carried out gradually by squadristi and secret police. Today, these functions are assigned to the William Welds and the Oliver Revells. In the meantime, Project Democracy will find ways to denigrate and vilify the United States Constitution, even while going through the pretense of celebrating its anniversary.

CORPORATIST PROPAGANDA

In early 1975, Nicholas von Hoffman devoted his column in the Washington Post to revelations that certain prime financial supporters of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party have a "hidden agenda for American politics ... a planned economy ... state capitalism ... fascism without lampshade factories." Hoffman stated that the then-President of the United Auto Workers, Leonard Woodcock, was "willing to surrender the economic planning to the mega-corporations." In March 1975, Challenge magazine carried an article entitled "The Coming Corporatism," by R. E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler. The article stated in part:

Corporatism is a distinct form of economic structure. It was recognized as such in the 1930s by people of diverse political backgrounds, before Hitler extinguished the enthusiasm which greeted Mussolini's variant. The fact that our blinkered political vocabulary now sees the alternative pure forms of economy as simply "capitalism" or "socialism" is a consequence of the fact that the Axis powers lost the Second World War.

This "corporatism" is a comprehensive economic system under which the state intensively channels predominantly privately owned business towards four goals, which have become increasingly explicit during the current economic crisis: Order, Unity, Nationalism, and "Success."

Those, then, are the four aims. Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face. What the parties are putting forward now is an acceptable face of fascism; indeed a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted form.


The same year saw the creation of an Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning with a press conference attended by Woodcock, Robert Roosa, and Wassily Leontieff. Among the sponsors of ICNEP were J. K. Galbraith and Robert McNamara. At the same time, officials of the Swedish, German, British, and Italian parties of the Second International were expressing the idea that, whereas in the last depression, the financiers had turned to fascist mass movements to impose corporatism and austerity, this time the social democrats could survive by showing that they were the most efficient agency for corporatist austerity.

CORPORATISM IN THE 1988 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Signs are multiplying that with the present acceleration of economic collapse, corporatist agitation may become more widespread. One harbinger of such a trend is the highly ideologized presidential candidacy of former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt. In declaring his candidacy for President, Babbitt proposed a "gain-sharing" plan under which he claimed that by 1996 "two-thirds of American workers would directly share in the profits and losses of their own business." When asked whether such a policy were not a return to corporatism, Babbitt answered that he preferred to call it "competitiveness" or "futurism," and later admitted that he was not sure of the meaning of corporatism. Babbitt's candidacy is designed to expose broad strata of the population to various parts of the Trilateral ideological inventory.

The 1980 presidential candidacy of Trilateral Commission member Rep. John Anderson was also a vehicle for spewing out Malthusianism and anti-constitutional propaganda. Anderson's platform charged that despite the advent of post-industrial society, the Republicans and Democrats were still too "consumption-oriented." The platform stated: "The traditional parties were reasonably effective mechanisms for distributing the dividends of economic growth. But during a period in which the central task of government is to allocate burdens and orchestrate sacrifices, these parties have proved incapable of making the necessary hard choices. We are prepared to tell the American people what we must do, and allocate the burden in a manner sensitive to both economic efficiency and social equity." Babbitt's current rhetoric is strikingly similar.

THE FUTURE: LOOKING TOWARDS THE UPSURGE OF 2010-2030 FROM 1981

Samuel Huntington, in his recent (1981) book American Politics, develops a perspective for the future development of the American political system in the framework of conflict between increasingly authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian state control, on the one hand, and an underlying American value system and world-outlook which he calls the "American Creed" on the other. In Huntington's view, there is no doubt that the regime will become more oppressive: "An increasingly sophisticated economy and active involvement in world affairs seem likely to create stronger needs for hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization of power, expertise, big government specifically, and big organizations generally." (p. 228)

But this will conflict with the ideological American Creed, based on liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy and rooted in "seventeenth-century Protestant moralism and eighteenth-century liberal rationalism." (p. 229) Something has to give, says Huntington. On the one hand, there is a possibility that the American Creed could be junked, and "there are some signs that values are changing." "In the 1960s and 1970s in both Europe and America, social scientists found evidence of the increasing prevalence of 'post-bourgeois' or 'post-materialist' values, particularly among younger cohorts. In a somewhat similar vein, George Lodge foresaw the displacement of Lockean, individualistic ideology in the United States by a 'communitarian' ideology, resembling in many aspects the traditional Japanese collective approach."

Huntington predicts that the conflict between individualistic values and the centralized regime may explode early in the coming century specifically between 1010 and 2030, in a period of ferment and dislocation like the late 1960s: "If the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." At this time, he argues, "the oscillations among the responses could intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions." (p. 232) Such a process would be acted out as follows:

Lacking any concept of the state, lacking for most of its history both the centralized authority and the bureaucratic apparatus of the European state, the American polity has historically been a weak polity. It was designed to be so, and the traditional inheritance and social environment combined for years to support the framers' intentions. In the twentieth century, foreign threats and domestic economic and social needs have generated pressures to develop stronger, more authoritative decision-making and decision-implementing institutions. Yet the continued presence of deeply felt moralistic sentiments among major groups in American society could continue to ensure weak and divided government, devoid of authority and unable to deal satisfactorily with the economic, social and foreign challenges confronting the nation. Intensification of this conflict between history and progress could give rise to increasing frustration and increasingly violent oscillations between moralism and cynicism. American moralism ensures that government will never be truly efficacious; the realities of power ensure that government will never be truly democratic.

This situation could lead to a two-phase dialectic involving intensified efforts to reform government, followed by intensified frustration when those efforts produce not progress in a liberal-democratic direction, but obstacles to meeting perceived functional needs. The weakening of government in an effort to reform it could lead eventually to strong demands for the replacement of the weakened and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs. Given the perversity of reform, moralistic extremism in the pursuit of liberal democracy could generate a strong tide toward authoritarian efficiency. (p. 232)


Huntington then quotes Plato's celebrated passage on the way that the "culmination of liberty in democracy is precisely what prepares the way for the cruelest extreme of servitude under a despot."

The message is clear: sooner or later, all roads lead to Behemoth.

FASCISM AS AN AFTERMATH OF MILITARY DEFEAT

Nous sommes trahis! cried the French in 1870 as they recoiled from defeat in war. For the Germans of 1918, it was the Dolchstosslegende, the stab in the back of the fighting army by the surrender of the politicians. For D'Annunzio and Mussolini, it was the vittoria mutilata, the inability of Orlando to impose Italy's territorial and colonial demands in the imperialist haggling of Versailles. Each of these reproaches, whatever their historical merits might have been, became vital factors in engendering mass fascist mentality and mass fascist movements.

Parallels exist between such figures as Oliver North and the arditi who accompanied D'Annunzio to Fiume. According to former National Security Council director Robert McFarlane, "Lt. Col. Oliver North's experiences in the Vietnam War may have led him to secretly channel proceeds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels while he was an NSC aide," according to an article published in the Washington Times in March 1987. The article quotes McFarlane, interviewed while recovering from a suicide attempt, as follows: "For people who went through that, and Colonel North surely did, you come away with the profound sense of very intolerable failure. That is, a government must never give its word to people who may stand to lose their lives and then break faith. And I think it's possible that in the last year we've seen a commitment made to human beings in Nicaragua that is being broken."

As we have seen, the filibustering expedition of D'Annunzio to Fiume was a kind of dress rehearsal for Italian fascism. In post-World War I Germany, it was a similar kind of filibustering activity, the military campaigns of the Baltic Freikorps against the Bolsheviks, that created a significant part of the fascist potential which later aggregated in the Nazi Party. For the fascism of Project Democracy, the close historical parallel is the filibustering in Central America around the Contra war.

_______________

Notes:

1. See Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporate State, p. 2

2. Finer, Mussolini's Italy, p. 499

3. G. Lowell Field, The Syndical and Corporative Institutions of Italian Fascism, p. 137

A WEATHERMAN IN THE WHITEHOUSE?

The Weather Underground terrorist cult was a largely successful operation of the left CIA to wreck the peace and student movements (SDS) after 1969.

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The cult's logo (above, on the cover of Bill Ayers' book) featured a rainbow with a lightning bolt.

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Does Obama's campaign logo (above) bear a strange resemblance? Obama is a close friend and neighbor of Weatherman terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were rewarded with virtual immunity from prosecution and tenured professorships for their work as provocateurs. In 1995 they helped launch Obama's political career by hosting a fundraiser for his state senate campaign in their home. Obama and Ayers appeared at conferences together, and both were board members of the Woods Fund in Chicago until 2002. Above all, Obama worked for Ayers for eight years: Ayers was co-founder, organizer, and dominant personality of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a project for social engineering in the Chicago schools, where Obama served as Ayers' hand-picked chairman of the board from 1995-2003. -- WGT.

The Weathermen were a countergang -- a group of provocateurs or hooligans that is inserted into a target group to discredit, destabilize and destroy it.

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The Weathermen logo may in turn be based on the logo and flag of the British Union of Fascists, or BUF (above) -- a white lightning stroke on a dark blue background, in a white circle, within an outer red circle or background. Oswald Mosley, the 1930's BUF leader, modeled his party of Blackshirts on Mussolini. He played a role in the "Hitler Project:" the installation of Nazism by the City of London and Wall Street, in order to bring about the mutual destruction of Germany and Russia, the two great European rivals of the century to Anglo-American hegemony. Research points to the conclusion that the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis were all countergangs introduced by British Imperialism to debase rival nations.

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Above, top: The popular website Rense.com juxtaposed a jut-jawed image of Il Duce, the Fascist leader Mussolini, over an Obama campaign poster of similarly serious mien.

Above, center: Hope and Change -- leitmotifs of Hitler's oratory, too -- revolutionary slogans to mobilize the masses of the world, now with Obama as keynote speaker on the U.S.-U.K. mass media megaphone. Will the ensuing uproar only take place in places that are targeted by the U.S.-U.K. for a Great Change to the worse, like Sudan, Pakistan, China and Russia? Interesting that China is hosting the Olympics, perfect occasion for a provocation. (Strange how Hitler got the games in 1936, too.) Will 2008 be the makings of another 1968, or 1848, when England was unscathed, while the rivals targeted by he revolutionary agents were all shaken to their timbers?

Above bottom: Parody poster on the Internet, with the text: "It's an elitist thing -- you wouldn't understand." -- PP
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